Yesterday I finished the last, tiny, touch-up revisions of Same Old Story. I even printed out a clean copy and wrote "Final" in the corner of the manuscript, which now dozes tidily on the shelf, handsome and unscrawled-upon . . . though I can't send it away to the publisher till I undergo the trial of posing for a new author photo. And why that should be such a trial I don't know. You'd think that after all these years of living with a photographer, I would have worked this problem out.


Today, after taking the dog to the vet, I get to crouch in the garden in 90-degree heat picking our first batch of beans. Deer flies will be dive-bombing my head, and bean rash will be spreading over my forearms, all for the sake of a colander of tiny, tiny slivers of new beans. Before enlightenment I hauled water and chopped wood. After enlightenment I hauled water and chopped wood. Did you notice that Thoreau and Woody Guthrie have birthdays in the same week? I think I will invite them both over for dinner tonight. I bet they like beans.


In the meantime I think I'll give you a random sample from the anthology. . and apparently what you're getting today is from Ornithology, poet Lynda Hull's tribute to Charlie Parker--a bracing cityscape break from my country-mouse chatter:


         . . .Women smoked the boulevards
   with gardenias afterhours, asphalt shower-

slick, ozone charging air with sixteenth

        notes, that endless convertible ride to find

the grave

This is, ideally, my summertime work schedule, and for the past couple of days it really has been my schedule.

Get up at 6:15. Make coffee and read comical newspaper headlines to my son before he heads out to his painting job. Feed animals. Eat breakfast. Make bread and/or do laundry. Sit down at my desk. Eat lunch. Go back to my desk. Mid-afternoon, go outside and mow grass, weed, harvest garlic, pick peas, take clothes off the line, feed animals once again, etc. Open beer. Make dinner. Eat dinner. Sit on the couch and read while Tom washes dishes. Watch an episode of the 1936 film-serial version of Flash Gordon (a peculiar and amusing spectacle). Go to bed and read a few more pages before falling asleep.

During the past few days I've spent my desk time working on an editing project and some residual Frost Place stuff, but today I will turn my attention to the anthology, due to the press by the beginning of October, and my forthcoming poetry collection, due to the press by the end of August. I am, in fact, ahead of schedule on both of these books and am feeling hopeful about being able to go back to the western Pennsylvania manuscript in the fall. Altogether, I am in a hopeful state of mind. I still don't have a real job, but I do feel as if the strands of my vocation are finally falling into place.

I've been thinking about "Mrs. Dickinson Waits in the Car," the poem I posted yesterday. It's an overwrought piece, as you can see--tonally controlled by the hepped-up verbs and adjectives but also by the rhyme scheme, which plays into the melodramatic hands of those grasping parts of speech. (Ah, mixed metaphors; what would we do without them?). In my own writing, I find that sound almost always controls word choice, which in turn almost always controls imagery. That is, I do not create the picture first and then dig around for words to describe it. Rather, I hear a syllable rhythm and then find a word that fits it, which in turn leads me to imagine what else would go with that word sonically and visually. Because I am primarily a narrative poet, I sometimes wonder if this is an odd approach to writing; but then again, most of the time I'm convinced that Dickens must have invented Sam Weller and Mr. Micawber in just the same way.

The other day, after my reading in Shelburne Falls, poet Peggy O'Brien commented kindly about the way I move from voice to voice in my poems. I was so pleased: I hate it when people mistake all my I characters for me. Even the ones that are kind-of-sort-of about myself are dramatized versions of an exaggerated me. Poems, as I'm always complaining to you, are not journal entries but entities unto themselves--canvases, musical scores, notations for a one-woman show, tiny landscapes that I pepper with mudholes and dandelions, miniature governments that I overthrow . . . often ineptly, to be sure, but sometimes everything does work out for my subjects, at least temporarily.

Mrs. Dickinson Waits in the Car

Dawn Potter

My Mother does not care for thought—

                                    Emily Dickinson

A few meager stars, a hazy moon

brighter than old Kentuck,

and a bulge of frost spooned

across the windshield like a plucked,

flash-frozen chick. Into this arctic

chariot, the heater chafes and spouts

its idiot vows. Yes, I lied about Kentuck.

No doubt, it’s glowing like all get-out,

like a pair of gibbous moons, like molten

honey dripped into a summer lake.

Blame art, then: I’ve been soaking up Bolton’s

poems, and now I’m acting like a fake

southerner, which is to say gothically

depressed while making love to every rum-

soaked predicate I meet. Treat gothically

as a ringer for New England numb.

Today a friendly rube lauded my skill

at prosy contemplation, but what a crock.

Call a heart a spade: call me a fading, moody kill-

joy with a romance eye for loss and schlock.

The car fan chatters hopelessly; newsmen

chant wind-chill rates and hockey stats.

Like any hausfrau I fret over loaves in the oven,

socks on the line, carboys of milk, and ruinous vats

of soup. There they burn or boil.

Here I dally in this wrapper-strewn capsule,

this (laugh with me!) bell jar. Can I stand loyal

to her, cruel queen of diction, and also rule

my roost, my squat piratical outpost?

I shiver; I prop my tome of poems

against the cruiser’s plastic wheel. I boast

that they age for me: these jeroboams

of syntax, these sherry cups of rage.

Yet these tired hands; yet these cold feet.

Go ahead: remind me to shut up, to flip the page,

to change the station, to bleat

            of Mother’s lonely vigil.

I’m not proud of my idle arrogance.

Meanwhile, the rye loaf chars and the milk spills.

            They’re out of my ken, for a hatful of minutes.

                        Let me claim to be oracular.

“Poetry is not like reasoning,” urges Shelley.

And I reply: “nothing in particular”

            is the maiden speech of every tragedy.

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

I warned you that I was planning to redesign this blog, and months later I finally did. If you hate the format, let me know; but it did seem to me that the sidebar style had become awkward and unwieldy. If you can think of anything else I ought to include on the site, leave me a note.

Today we have the sort of weather that people in South Carolina must picture when they imagine Maine: blue-eyed, clean-sprung, cool but with the promise of modest heat. Yesterday I made strawberry ice cream; today I will make lists. But also I am thinking about bardic poetry . . . and what one poet's private, humble call to bardic might be. For don't you, too, have moments when you know you must speak to anyone who will listen?

from Letters to a Young Poet 

Rainer Maria Rilke

And about emotions: all emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. Everything that you can think in the face of your childhood, is right. Everything that makes more of you than you have heretofore been in your best hours, is right. Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

trans. W. D. Herter Norton

A small wind at 7 a.m. The sky is blue and clear, the air lighter than it has been for days. I am sitting in my darkened kitchen listening to the faucet drip. A squirrel scrabbles at the bird feeder; the small wind slips into the room through the open windows. Before I fell asleep last night, I read two pages of Rabbit Is Rich. Then, much later, I woke with a jolt. A thousand memories, forebodings, dreams were tumbling through my mind; and it took a long time for that dust to settle back onto the tables and pianos. To quiet my thoughts, I dug out my childhood trick of imaging myself on a swing, and now that it is morning again I find that I am thinking about this poem from A Child's Garden of Verses, which I loved very much when I was very small.


The Swing

by Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing,

   Up in the air so blue?

Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

   Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,

   Till I can see so wide,

Rivers and trees and cattle and all

   Over the countryside—

Till I look down on the garden green,

   Down on the roof so brown—

Up in the air I go flying again,

   Up in the air and down!

I'm home again and ready to stop traveling for a while. Today one boy goes off to camp for a month; on Monday the other one goes back to his paint-scraping job. Tom is finally employed again, and I will be editing again, and we will slip into some kind of summertime routine that might even involve getting paid. But it is so extremely muggy here. Everything in the house smells musty and stale, the grass is too tall and the weeds are too thick, and I don't know how I will possibly catch up on any household chores when just walking across the kitchen makes me break into a sweat.

Among other things I must do this weekend is remind Tom that I need a new author photo for the next poetry collection. This won't make either of us happy: I hate posing for pictures, and he hates taking posed pictures. On the bright side, however, we also have to start thinking about a cover photo. It does make me happy to see his artwork on the covers of my books. And if you haven't looked at what he's doing with pixels, you should check them out. He's been printing these images onto watercolor paper so that the colors slightly bleed into one another. The result is very beautiful.