Today will be my last day at home for a while. I'm not sure how long I'll be in Vermont--maybe home as early as Saturday, but possibly away for a week or so. You won't hear from me here tomorrow morning, as I'll be up and driving by dawn, but I'm hoping that I can fall into a more regular blog schedule once I get settled.

I'll spend much of today trying to get garden and house things done so Tom doesn't have to shoulder too many of my chores while he's a temporary bachelor. The garden is complicated as things will still need harvesting, but I think I've got the peppers under control, the tomatoes are winding down, and many of the fall crops can just sit and grow till I get back. So today: laundry and floors, packing and lawn mowing, and making lots of lists for myself and for Tom. I've got to bring my Zoom setup with me, plus a portable mattress, plus books, plus work clothes and teaching clothes . . . it's a good thing I'll be alone in the car so I'll have room for this ridiculous amount of stuff.

Yesterday I sat in on a friend's poetry class to talk about how I handle stanza breaks, line breaks, and other kinds of white space in my poems, and it was a really enjoyable experience. Such a friendly class, and I do have fun trying to figure out how to explain myself.

In the meantime, people have been signing up for the Frost Place Studio Session classes! As of this morning, there's only one space left on the reserve list for the the December chapbook class. Please let me know as soon as possible if you're interested in that final chapbook spot. The Homer class is now three-quarters full, so you might want to act quickly on that one as well.

I'd like to think I'll be doing a little bit of revision work today, as this might be my last chance for the foreseeable future. But if I don't, I don't. I'm not going to beat myself up about what I can't accomplish. I'm still reading--I'm always reading--and that's the big thing. I'll bring along Thackeray's Vanity Fair, the Iliad, Alice Oswald's collection Falling Awake, a New Yorker issue on food writing, and undoubtedly a few other books that I won't be able to leave behind.

Another cool morning. It won't be long till I'm lighting fires in the wood stove, so it's a good thing that we (Tom mostly) finally got the new firewood stacked and tucked away for the winter. I accomplished less homestead-wise than I meant to yesterday, mostly because the phone would not stop ringing and then I fell down a "how do I make a newsletter about my upcoming workshops?" rabbit hole. I did in fact figure out how to make a newsletter, but I also had to make a mailing list to go along with it, so that was a lot of time and trouble . . . good trouble, because now the job is done, but it didn't get any bathrooms cleaned or wood stacked.

Anyway, the newsletter turned out to be a good idea. Already, several people have signed up for classes; clearly, taking the time to broadcast them was more important than vacuuming. (As you can tell, I am not a natural-born marketer.) I'll paste a copy of the newsletter to the bottom of this letter, in case you're interested in seeing it or maybe even registering for a session.

Today I'll need to buckle down and actually do housework and go grocery shopping and pick vegetables and such. Mid-afternoon, I'm making a guest appearance in my friend Bruce's poetry class, to talk about how I manage white space in my poems.

I'm trying hard to juggle everything before I leave for Vermont on Thursday. Probably I should worry a little less, let myself coast a bit. At least that's the advice I'd give you.

* * *

Dawn Potter

Upcoming poetry workshops

Fall 2021

Dear friends--

Frost Place Studio Session classes are open for business! This is a new venture at the Frost Place--an offering of online classes, year round--and I’m excited to have been named creative director of the project. 

Our first classes are already in progress. I’m currently finishing up a 3-session introductory chapbook seminar, which filled so quickly that we’re considering  running a second class in December. Here’s a link to the description of the current class. December dates would be Sunday afternoons on 12/5, 12/12, and 12/19, 1-4 p.m., via Zoom. Participation is limited to 6 people, so if you’re interested in attending, please email me ASAP, and I’ll add you to the reservation list.

In November, I’ll  be leading a weekend-long generative writing class, “Revisiting Homer’s Odyssey,” centering around passages from Emily Wilson’s new translation of the epic. This will be held on Zoom, 11/13 and 11/14. Applications are open, with a participant cap of 12,  and already the class is half full. This session is open to writers at any level, so please join us for an intense and collegial weekend of poetry and conversation.

Stay tuned for more Studio Session offerings in 2022! Upcoming classes will include generative writing weekends centering around the work of some of Poland’s greatest 20th-century poets as well as an immersion into the poetry of New York City. In the pipeline are revision workshops, a seminar on comedy in poems, a one-day class for people new to poetry, teacher roundtables, sessions with guest faculty, and so much more.

As I design these classes, I am always open to suggestions for topics and faculty. Please be in touch!

I’m so looking forward to spending time with you and your poems--

 

With affection,

Dawn

Monday morning again, but this time a cool one: it's just 48 degrees here in Portland, and I am very glad to be wrapped in a thick bathrobe and drinking hot coffee.

I've got various things to do today, much of it niggly house and garden stuff, as I am prepping to go to Vermont later this week, where I'll be helping out with family stuff for an indefinite period . . . a few days, ideally, but possibly longer if my parents and sister need me. I'll keep working while I'm there, teaching and editing and reading mss and such, but also taking over their cooking and housework and doing garden chores and so on. Wish us all luck.

In the meantime, though, I'm enjoying being home. I had a great class session on Sunday, thanks to the brilliance of the participants, who had such wonderful conversations about each other's manuscripts and seemed to love playing around with the practice poems I gave them. I guess I'd have to say that this class is a success, at least so far.

My new studio setup is working out very well: after a year of awkwardness, taking part in a zoom session has become comfortable and predictable. And when class is over I can wander downstairs and check baseball scores, and Tom can say, "Want to go for a walk?," and we can step out into the late summer flowers, and life, for a few moments, feels easy and relaxed.

This afternoon Teresa and I will talk about the Iliad, and maybe I'll also get a chance to work on my poem draft, or maybe I'll just be moving firewood and tearing tired plants out of the garden. The tomatoes are wearing down, though the peppers are still going strong, and all of my fall crops--kale, broccoli, fennel, radishes, carrots--are delighted with the cooling temperatures.

 It's a lovely, sunshiny morning, with everything glinting wet from the sudden big thunderstorm that wrecked our cookout last night. For a few minutes we were sitting around the fire pit drinking wine with our neighbor. And then the skies blackened, and lightning rolled in, and rain started to fall, and Tom had to figure out how to cook the rest of the meal in the kitchen.

All went well, and we had a fun dinner party anyway: he did manage to grill the peppers, onions, and eggplant before the deluge began, and he broiled and fried the kebabs and the other lamb bits he'd prepped. I'd made fresh salsa and a green bean and black grape salad, and we finished with a lemon tart for dessert, which has become one of my favorite company desserts: pretty, delicious, not cloyingly sweet, and completely reliable . . . e.g., the crust doesn't shrink during prebaking, the filling sets perfectly every time, and the pie pops out of the tart pan without sticking or tearing or otherwise breaking my heart.

This morning I'll be hauling firewood and reading the Iliad, and then I'll spend the afternoon upstairs teaching my chapbook class. Our focus today will be on adding, subtracting, and moving poems around in a manuscript. My nervousness about the class seems to have ebbed away, maybe because the homework responses were so terrific. Now I'm simply looking forward to spending the afternoon with these smart people and their fascinating poems.

Another dim and cloudy morning, here in the little northern city by the sea. I was late rising, having slept badly in the wee hours and then fallen hard into a dreamscape in which I was repeatedly rescuing my baby from drowning. Ugh. Insomnia is much better than that.

Now I'm drinking black coffee and considering my day, which will involve (naturally) firewood and some baking for our little dinner party. Yesterday I made and froze the tart shell, so I'll just need to bake and fill it with lemon curd today. And I'll need to mix together the pita dough this morning so that I have plenty of time to get each little bread through the oven.

Outside, Canada geese are honking, moving from cove to pond, making their first, slow migratory shifts. The yard is looking dingy, like a badly swept room. Autumn really is here, though I have yet to close the windows or start a fire in the wood stove or even put on a jacket and socks.

I'm still reading the Iliad and Vanity Fair, still fidgeting with my poem draft. I'm thinking about tomorrow afternoon's chapbook class and skeptically imagining the Red Sox in the playoffs. Tom and I are looking forward to attending a neighborhood yard sale this morning.

You might remark that my life seems pretty tame. But in fact my head is full of battle. The Iliad is a graphic and dread-filled poem, and that blood is seeping everywhere.

I slept so hard last night that I'm staggering around this morning like a drunk. It was the cool air that zonked me: such a sweet night for sleeping under an open window.

Yesterday I did finish moving the old woodpile into the basement, so that may have contributed to my pleasant weariness. Moving firewood is basically weight lifting, with squats built in. Today I have to stack the cellar pile, and tomorrow Tom and I need to get started on the green pile in the driveway. So I will be firewood-tired for a few days to come.

I also did write a first draft of a new poem, which turned out to be a conversation with the Iliad, so that was exciting. I have a hard time loving the Iliad, because I have a hard time concentrating on the litany of death: so-and-so from Troy is speared in the groin by so-and-so of the Greeks; so-and-so of the Greeks falls from his chariot and is crushed by a stone by so-and-so from Troy. And yet, of course, the weight and tedium of these litanies hold terrible power because they enact the weight and tedium of battle. Despite my struggle to concentrate as a reader, the poem does its work on me.

Today I've got some class prep to do, plus the aforementioned firewood, plus grocery shopping because Tom and I are having a little dinner party with our neighbor on Saturday evening. Tom's going to grill lamb kidneys (from the magnificent lamb we bought from our friend Amber's sheep farm) along with various garden vegetables, and I'm going to make salsa and pita and a lemon tart.

I also hope to do some revision on my Iliad draft, and to read more of the actual Iliad, and to endure my exercise class, and to mow grass, and no doubt this list will stretch much longer as I think of all of the other things I could be doing too . . .

Even when I'm not getting paid for anything, I somehow seem to cram my days full of activity. I wonder if that's good or bad.

New firewood is scheduled to arrive within the hour, and here's hoping I can get the old firewood moved into the cellar by the end of the day so that we can move the pile out of the driveway as soon as possible. But everything outside is so wet; we had thunderstorms and downpours all night, so I don't think I can really get started on this project till afternoon. 

Autumn chores abound: I've got yet another batch of tomatoes to sauce, more peppers to pick, and I should think about tearing out some of the flowers that have reached shabby stage. Already a few leaves have begun to fall, though the weather is still warm.

Yesterday I finished up the first-pass reading of my friend's manuscript and sent it off to him with comments, so now my desk is temporarily empty. I'll be writing this morning--working, I hope, on some four-word prompts from the Iliad--and then, after lunch, rushing into town for a haircut appointment before I devolve into firewood moving. I can see that this note to you is a chronological mess, perhaps an accurate depiction of my brain this morning, which keeps blipping little "gotta get [chore] done" messages like some sort of '90s TV-show pager.

To recap, then. It's mid-week, mid-September, in the early years of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The people of earth are in crisis, dying in droves from a virulent virus. The planet's climate is likewise shaky, and so is American empire. Nonetheless, in a small seaside city, in the nation's easternmost state, a poet is reading Homer and picking vegetables.