from the first draft of my introduction to A Poet's Sourcebook: Writings about Poetry, from the Ancient World to the Present, selected by me [Autumn House Press, 2013]:

“How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers,” wrote Virginia Woolf, in a not entirely complimentary essay about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-poem Aurora Leigh. Yet as Woolf well knew, the back story offers its own illuminations; and “we may suspect that Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushed into the drawing-room and said that here, where we live and work, is the true place for the poet.”

As I sifted among my choices for this anthology, I found myself returning again and again to Woolf’s remarks. Why do we hover between reading a poet and reading about a poet? And how does poetry come from where we live and work? These are questions that poets, and the watchers of poets, have been pondering for millennia; and if there is any overarching theme to A Poet's Sourcebook, it lingers within those perplexities.

Neither a craft handbook nor a theory manual, this anthology is merely one reader’s record of the long human need to make poetry. For no matter how distant in time those individuals have become, reading about that need, in both their own words and the words of others, keeps our relationship with them intimate and immediate. Suetonius explains Virgil’s revision process; Sir Philip Sidney argues with Aristotle; Emily Brontë peels potatoes and creates an imaginary country; Phillis Wheatley tries on John Milton’s syntax for size; Walt Whitman invents a manifesto for a poetic tribe that doesn’t yet exist; Audre Lorde sings the body electric; Jack Wiler rants about high school; ten-year-old Ethan Richard complains that poetry “always spouts the truth you don’t want other people to hear in public.”

In her novel Daniel Deronda, George Eliot writes:

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. 

As I worked on this anthology, I became increasingly aware of my “tender kinship” for these writers, past and present, distant and near, who are, in some deep ancient way, my flesh and bones. The native land we share is poetry, and the very act of choosing these particular voices from among all the other voices of history was like embarking alongside them on a voyage to our collective home. Yet at the same time I was discovering how personal any such compendium must be; how, despite all efforts at universality, it ends up reflecting its editor’s obsessions and limitations.

On Frost Day, the board and staff of the Frost Place will be honoring Baron Wormser. If you're a friend, student, colleague, or admirer, please consider dropping by the Frost Place on Sunday, July 8, to join them in the celebration. Or, if you can't make it (and, rats, I can't either because I have to drive a kid to camp that weekend), perhaps you'd consider sending me an email or a comment that I can forward to the executive director for sharing.

This is what poet Gray Jacobik says about my forthcoming collection, Same Old Story:

"Potter marries the quotidian and the sublime pretty much line by line. That pairing is dictional, syntactical, rhythmical, and often conceptional as well, but always, always, the scope is sweeping and the affect--in this reader’s experience--unparalleled."

I don't know how to explain how it felt to receive that email from Gray. As if she must have been talking about someone else. As if it never gets easier to believe that what I write makes sense to anyone. As if, when I close my eyes, I will wake up and discover that I never wrote a poem in my life.

Because, at this moment, how much luckier could I be?

The Years

Dawn Potter

Dreamy as Tarzan, the years murmur

their old tune as we stride away from them

into our spotlit lives. Like fathers, they armor

themselves against loss, hawking phlegm

into coffee cans, scratching their scaly pates,

though a Nehi odor lingers in their cough,

faint as sour cream. Behind their rusty agate

stare slides a slow-rolling map of sloughed-

off days along the river. Scabby grapevines

grip the porch rails, courting light. A peahen

chitters in the weeds, and on the clothesline

the half-yellowed shirts of sweating men

sag like idle hands. The years hum our quavered names.

We clench our fists: panicked, ruthless, dumb, ashamed. 

[forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]

Tomorrow I head down to Massachusetts on a brief road trip with my eldest son. I think this may be our first trip alone since his toddlerhood, and it will surely be more pleasant than our earlier ones were. J was not fond of his car seat,  nor was he amenable to sitting in the backseat by himself, nor was he lured by contemplative silence or comic radio songs or the hijinks of a plush Humpty Dumpty or a bottomless cup of apple juice or the soothing hum of the engine. After 45 minutes he was screaming, and then he kept it up for the next five hours. Traveling with J was a two-parent job, and it's a wonder we ever got anywhere.

Tomorrow will be so much better. We will swap off with the driving chore, and stop for coffee, and make ironic remarks about items for sale at the rest area, and order Vietnamese sandwiches in the backwaters of Portland, Maine. It's true that he still doesn't care for riding in the car, but at least now he lets the stereo do the screaming.

On Thursday at 7 p.m. I'll be reading at the Collected Poets Series, held at Mocha Maya's in Shelburne Falls, and then back I go to Maine, ready to haul Son Number 2 off to canoe camp and return Son Number 1 to paint scraping. But what's teenage summertime without a crappy job? Merely sleep.

It is difficult to return to a world without conversations about poetry, but strawberry season helps. Yesterday I weeded beets in a downpour, pitted cherries, listened to the Red Sox barely beat the Mariners, cooked steamers, and watched the evening sky fade to a watery shadow. Today, however, I return to copyediting. I can't say that I'm thrilled--though if there is scant excitement in copyediting, at least there is a great deal of blunt, unromantic language practice.

Here's a little comment on poetry from Shakespeare's A Midsummer-Night's Dream. It makes poetry sound nothing like copyediting, which probably means I shouldn't be thinking about it this morning. I may become restless and dissatisfied with my poky lot.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!

The spirit of Whitman seems to be floating in the aether. Though Frost is always chief ghost at the Frost Place, Whitman joined us early in the week and would not leave. Rather by accident, I read a passage; then later a participant read a passage; today another participant sent me another passage.

We seemed to need him last week. We seemed to need to hear him. For the first time in my life I really, truly absorbed his lines as biblical. We sat in Frost's barn and listened to the Gospel of Walt. And I think part of what made these moments so compelling was the fact that, like a church service, they were communal. We listened together; we read together; we responded together. We suspended our disbelief.

Somewhere in San Francisco there is a place called Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. The mere existence of such a place makes me wonder why Walt doesn't have one too.

part 9 of  Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

           Walt Whitman

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!

Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!

Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women

generations after me!

Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!

Stand up, tall masts of Manahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!

Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!

Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!

Gaze, loving and thirsty eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!

Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!

Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!

Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!

Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;

Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly yet haste

with the hasting current;

Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;

Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes

            have time to take it from you!

Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head,

            in the sunlit water!

Come one, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners,

            sloops, lighters!

Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset!

Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at night-fall!

            cast red or yellow light over the tops of the houses!

Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,

You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,

About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,

Thrive, cities—bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers,

Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,

Keep your places, objects that which none else is more lasting.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,

We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,

Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,

We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,

You furnish your parts toward eternity,

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.