I woke up early this morning with this poem in my head. It's in the new manuscript, so of course I've been rereading it fervently along with the rest of the collection. But I couldn't figure out why it might be niggling at me more than the other poems were. And then I remembered that, as I was driving to Dover last night to pick up kids after theater practice, I was listening to a Fresh Air interview with an accordion player. The songs mentioned in this poem are all polkas, so perhaps that was the dream link. On the other hand, its bossiness might be linked to an acquaintance's request to send her some poems about aging that she can use in her work with nursing-home residents. I hadn't intended to send her any of my own poems, but maybe this poem was telling me that I should.

Mill Hunky

Dawn Potter

Raised in a coal patch flaunts his mustache survives

on pierogis and Coca-Cola splashes liquid steel into girder molds

plays the squeezebox plucks the guitar gulps dago red from a pint bottle

sleeps it off in the Ford bets on the dog races carries a switchblade

cheats at cards curves his rough palm round the hip of a big Slovene girl

from Johnstown sings In Heaven There Is No Beer sings I’ve Got a Wife at Home

swears at the umpire dreams of victory staggers into a church

at two in the morning loves his brother as himself ignores advice

spends his pay on a gold tooth

this bent old man with no teeth left a shabby dog

and five grandbabies Beloved Be Faithful he sings

and curves his rough palm over the dog’s

narrow head.

Last night, as I lay in the tub recovering from Firewood Weekend, I was reading a New Yorker article about a playwright I'd never heard of before and whose plays I will probably never see. I soon realized that if this article (written by Alec Wilkinson) was trying to make me very interested in Jez Butterworth's plays, then it was failing because I really couldn't quite figure out what they were about (though lying in hot water after a long day of stacking wood may have had something to do with that fog). However, it did make me very interested in Butterworth as a guy to hang out with because it was sprinkled with numerous intense remarks about other artists' struggles to make art--or to deal with not making it. For instance:

Butterworth quoted Harold Pinter, with whom he'd grown very close. Pinter, who died in 2008, once said that "when you can't write, you feel you've been banished from yourself."

And this:

He recalled watching a Miles Davis interview on YouTube, in which the jazz legend was asked how, having spent years in the seventies doing pretty much nothing, he had managed to return to work: "And he said 'Dizzy Gillespie came round my house and said "What the fuck are you doing?" and I went back to work.'" Butterworth laughed. "I just loved the idea that it's that simple."

And also this:

A few years ago, Butterworth went to an exhibition of Robert Capa photos in New York. Capa's contact sheets were on display, and you could see the pictures leading up to each famous shot. The differences between photos came down to a matter of milliseconds, yet, Butterworth said, "the one before, that is so nearly the shot that rings like a bell forever," had no resonance at all. "And it taught me something about the difference between nearly and really. Those days when you're looking at a page and thinking this is an imitation of itself--it could be as close as the frame before the actual one, and it's nothing. It's nothing."

Here's his reaction to listening to his friend, the Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance, read Ted Hughes's poem "Daffodils" aloud:

It had such a fundamental effect on the play [Butterworth was trying to write, Jerusalem], because you were suddenly aware of what this person was capable of. You knew the second that it began that what you were hearing was the poem; it was the clearest transmission. It came through on the clearest frequency, and I had never experienced anything like it in my life. It was like hearing Aretha Franklin sing.

Yet even though he seems to have spent much of his interview with Wilkinson acknowledging the power of influence, he was also able to speak precisely about its dangers, especially those that emanate from the work of an admired and well-loved mentor. For we can love our mentors too much; we can begin to pretend that their vision of the world is our own. And it never is.

He says Pinter's friendship was as important to him as Pinter's work, yet he acknowledges that he went through a Pinter "phase," something he was glad to emerge from. "Harold was such an inspiring man and guiding light, and so relentlessly himself. But a play like 'The Homecoming' is fucking horrible--what that is saying about relationships and people. It's unbelievable and brilliant, and so true. But, Christ, it is horrible."

Still, my favorite anecdote appears in the article's final paragraph, when Butterworth is shrugging about the likelihood that audiences will be disappointed by the modesty of his newest play, The River. His remarks are a good reminder that we have to stay attentive to the shifts in our creative paths. It's not our job to give the audience what it expects but to open a door and ask them to walk through it.

Quite apart from taking pride in the show, Butterworth is pleased with [the play] for reasons of perversity. He talked about Neil Young, one of his musical heroes, following up his hit album of 1972, "Harvest," with a series of more muted records, among them "Tonight's the Night." He said, "He's playing 'Tonight's the Night' to an English audience, and they're screaming at him for songs off 'Harvest' and they're all off  'Tonight's the Night,' and at the end he goes, 'I'm going to play you something you've heard before,' and they all cheer, and he played 'Tonight's the Night' again."

It's eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, and I am sitting at the kitchen table rereading my poem "Mr. Kowalski" and thinking, My god, did I really write this?

Something about that poem feels like an out-of-body experience. I know I wrote it, I know I struggled over it, but where the hell did it come from?

Imagine me spending day 2 of Firewood Weekend stacking log after log, miming friendly commentary to deafened Tom who is running the splitter, running in and out of the house to check on the rising bread, speeding up to Dover to bring Paul home, unloading groceries, stacking wood, spelling Tom for an hour or so at the splitter, bossing Paul into stacking wood . . . and all the while wondering, My god, did I really write that?

As I mentioned earlier this week, the new poetry manuscript I'll be submitting to my publisher includes a sheaf of western Pennsylvania poems, many of which were triggered by historical anecdotes and include details or language from those sources. So I spent much of yesterday typing out a list of source notes to include with the manuscript . . . though I do always wonder: does anybody other than me care about citations in a work of fiction?

I'm always very interested in finding out where a writer's ideas come from, but at the same time I understand that those sources aren't necessarily central to the imaginative essence of the poem or the novel. Peter Mathiessen's Shadow Country may circle an actual series of events, but the beauty and intensity of that book arise from the way in which the writer elaborated on the facts. Likewise, Ford Madox Ford's trilogy The Fifth Queen, a gorgeous and tragic evocation of the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine Howard,  is more or less a complete lie, though the characters did exist as historical figures. Ford did not feel the need to include a list of "books I have read about the Tudors" at the end of his trilogy: but to tell the truth, I wish he had included a list so that I could search them out and read what he was reading in the months before his novels came to life, when the ideas were still fermenting in his mind.

Rain again, with a prospect of snow.

Orange flames lick at the blurred window of the wood stove. The lamps expel circles of gold into the browning air, whose color is the absence of sun in a room that stares north into a thicket of autumn olive, into crazed bare-limbed lilac. Behind their clutter, a pine forest looms like a siege.

At random, I open Milosz's Treatise on Poetry, and he tells me:

Spirits of the air, of fire, of water,
Keep close to us, but not too close.

His lines are like arrows, and he shoots to kill. The spirits waver in the northlight--masked but half-recognizable, crowding me, as lake mist crowds a solitary canoe, as guilt crowds an unremembered dream.


The Husbands

Dawn Potter

Their work boots were filmed with grease,

and their faces were weary.

They never showed up till the fourth inning.

Knees spread, they let themselves rest

on chairs beside the gravel-pocked ball field;

and when the women hollered, “Good eye, honey!”

at a tearful, trembling batter,

the men smiled like gentle but distracted strangers.

In their houses, a drawer slammed,

a kettle boiled, a hound twitched on the mat.

Televisions gabbled,

and the husbands pined for a secret world.

One drove six hours in dense fog

to a motel in Mississauga

instead of sitting down to supper.

Another stayed up till dawn

picking out “Night of the Johnstown Flood”

on his mother-in-law’s old guitar.

They fumbled with their sadness,

but nothing changed.

Women still clustered along the ball field

sharing packs of licorice, cat-calling the ump,

cheering at bloop singles and horrible throws to first.

The women behaved as if they had front-row tickets

to something magnificent and vital,

but the husbands couldn’t see, couldn’t quite see.

They raised their eyes toward the blackening sky

where swallows wheeled among the mosquitoes.

A child hacked at a pitch,

and the men’s thoughts clung to emptiness.

No one cried, “Cross out this life

that batters you down, and down, and down!”

Like chairs left in the rain for twenty years,

they sat.

Then one day their knees snapped

and they toppled into the flood.

For months now I have been wrestling with my western Pennsylvania manuscript--organizing, reorganizing; inserting, deleting; breaking it into sections and different sections and different sections. Nothing has been right; nothing has worked. As a group, the poems are unwieldy, disjointed, clumsy; and trying to collect them into any kind of order has been an exercise in despair.

It is hard to give up on a project that has been so vital to me. But last week, I admitted to myself that these poems cannot all be in the same book. I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the stacks, and thought, What's next?

And then I thought of my chapbook manuscript, Vocation, the one that was a prize finalist earlier this year. I took it out of storage and looked through it. My organization strategy had been to alternate several Pennsylvania and non-Pennsylvania poems, following a thematic thread of work in all of its ambiguities--joy, desperation, weariness, illness, destruction, and so on. Since putting together that chapbook, I'd written a number of other non-Pennsylvania poems. So using the chapbook as a template, I began creating a longer version of that original alternating manuscript. Now I began to understand that common subject matter was crossing back and forth among both kinds of poems, despite their historical separations: music, violence, baseball, obsession, time. I began to see a book.

The upshot: I have a new poetry collection, one that I am ready to ask my publisher to read. And if any of you are interested in being thoughtful early critics of its content and order, I would be happy and grateful.

Power, Responsibility, Creation, Change

Anyone living outside Maine must think Mainers are idiots. [We are.] Anyone living outside the United States must think Americans are idiots. [We are.]

Every news outlet is bombarding us with the vengeful, gloating greed of this season's political marionettes, who (under the guidance of their billionaire string pullers) have managed to thwart and bamboozle a depressed electorate into damaging its own best interests. But that is all I will say about yesterday, because now I'm going to press myself to focus on where I do have power, hard as that is to envision this morning.

And I hope you're focusing on your own power too. I hope you're calling on your righteous role as a citizen of the world, as a person who ponders conundrums, as a person who understands both/and, not just either/or. I hope you're calling on your strength as a person who pities and embraces and forgives and gets angry and stands up and shouts and speaks the truth.

I look at myself, and I know have the power to see and hear and feel. I know I have the power to write cogently about what I have witnessed. I know I have the power to convince at least a few other people to read or listen to what I have written. So on this gloomy, heartbreaking morning, I promise that I am going to keep watching and writing and talking and listening and feeling. I promise that I will chronicle the sweetness and the terror, the decay and the beauty. I promise that I will say what needs to be said--as clearly, as sharply, as imperatively, as I possibly can.

I promise to remember what the great Audre Lorde said in her 1978 speech, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power":

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.