1. CavanKerry tells me that the printer will be shipping Same Old Story this week, which means, I hope, that anyone who has ordered a copy will receive it soon.

2. Thanks to Maureen, who reads these notes regularly (and keeps a fine blog of her own), I learned that the collection was featured in the Academy of American Poets' April newsletter, advertised among books by Gertrude Stein, W. S. Merwin, William Logan, Edward Hirsch, and even Shel Silverstein. If that advertisement were a cocktail party, I would be lurking in a corner nursing my glass of box wine, wishing/fearing that someone would talk to me, and gloomily checking the clock. There's much to be said for mere virtual contiguity.

3. On Saturday my band, String Field Theory, is playing at the second annual fundraiser for the Aliza Jean Family Cancer Foundation. You probably remember that Aliza, the daughter of one of our band members, died of brain cancer last winter at age 13. The benefit raises money for other Maine children in similar dire straits; so if you live locally and you've been meaning to come watch us play, Saturday would be a good time to do so. I'll be singing a lot in this one. That may or may not be an inducement.

4. Don't forget to submit your applications for the Frost Place Conference on Poetry & Teaching. Scholarships are first-come, first-served, so make sure you apply as soon as possible. This summer's faculty includes Teresa Carson, Meg Kearney, Iain Haley Pollock, and Baron Wormser. And the air will be warm, and there will be green on the mountaintops, and Bode Miller's Olympic medals might be on exhibit at the Franconia town office, and the cranky spirit of Robert Frost will preside, and you may even see a bear.

5. The saddest story in this week's Bangor Daily News involved a dead baby, a burnt-out mobile home, and a meth lab. If I were the poet of that town, I think I would fall into the same black cellar hole that I really did fall into when Steven Lake murdered Amy Bagley Lake and their children Coty and Monica. As it is, I am tumbling down some slate-gray stairs over the tale. And the worst part is that this story isn't even surprising. It's merely terrible.


Ugly Town

Dawn Potter

The sun is under no obligation to shed its optimistic beams

on the ugliest town in Maine—not now, not in March

when I’ve steeled myself for gravel-picked mud and despair,

for broken branches and a plow-scarred dooryard

rimmed with a winter’s worth of dog turds, pale and crumbled

among the pale remaindered weeds.

But it does shine, that fool’s orb, for reasons best known to itself;

            and I slouch here in my yellow chair, both cold feet

parked under the woodstove, squinting into this cheerful, bossy glare,

            attempting to convince myself that unbridled nature

has, for once, chosen to be a genial master instead of the flogging brute

we expect here in the ugly town, where we don’t think

ski but shovel, don’t think flowers but floods.

Maybe I’ve been reading too many books—

too much Roth and Munro, too much Blake and Carruth,

all of them driven to detail bleak empty roads

and unmown lawns; evil alleys and poisonous rivers;

the fathers, dyspeptic, misunderstood; the mothers,

wiping schmaltz and ketchup from the shabby oilcloth; and meanwhile

            those thirteen angels on their magic seats, frowning and perturbed.

Of course there’s happiness too. No one denies the happiness,

but don’t count on it to carry you through. Keep your eye

steady, your irony sharp. Stay wary; it’s best to stay wary—

though not one of these writers, I can tell you right now,

has ever stayed wary enough, and they’ve paid for it in spades—

            a phrase that might, for dwellers of another clime,

connote cognac and midnight whist parties

but that here, in the ugly town, where most everyone

gambles by scratch ticket and goes to bed early,

means plain old digging:

in snow, in thankless stony soil, with a bent shovel,

with a belching backhoe; tearing up asphalt,

forking out a winter’s worth of choking black shit.

You can kill yourself when you pay in spades

for a neat square cellar hole—say, when you’re fifty years married

to a woman who’s dreamed for all those heavy decades

of trading her wind-licked trailer for a house with a furnace.

No, you haven’t had time, you haven’t had money,

all you’ve had is a middle-aged kid who won’t get out of the recliner

except to grab a beer from the icebox, all you’ve had

are those cars, one after the other, falling into seizures and dismay;

and if you can’t stop eating what you shouldn’t be eating,

at least there’s salt, there’s sugar, those reliable offerings

that remind you you’re still alive, that you haven’t yet

paid out every single spade. Yet it’s a lie, and you know it,

and I know it too because I tell my own brand of lies,

such as it’s okay to be easy on myself,

such as I mean well, such as it’s good enough

to chronicle the sweetness of this sunlight,

not to force myself to keep struggling to speak

when I don’t know how to think, when I don’t know how

to find the word, the only word, trembling, naked as a rat,

when I don’t know how to lay it down, wet and mewling,

among the schmaltz and the ketchup stains.

Someone might argue that here’s where a little wariness

would do me good, and not just me but all these writers

whose books I’ve been reading too often,

and even they might agree with you, on a bad morning.

But today, according to this obstinate sun, is not a bad morning.

Brilliance leaks and flows through window smears,

patches the dour carpet. The light refuses to let up.

It insists on itself, like a mean cat does,

gliding from nowhere to bite me on the ankle.

            The world is too much with us; late and soon

is what Wordsworth wrote, but it’s not what he meant.

            He was trying to say we were too distracted by our lives

to notice this sunshine, and here I am borrowing his words

            to explain that I am too distracted by this sunshine

to notice my life.  The world overtakes me,

            I’m not wary enough, and something bad will happen

if I don’t watch out. That’s the point to remember about writing.

           It doesn’t solve anything.

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]

Poem for March

Ugly Town

Dawn Potter

The sun is under no obligation to shed its optimistic beams

on the ugliest town in Maine—not now, not in March

when I’ve steeled myself for gravel-picked mud and despair,

for broken branches and a plow-scarred dooryard

rimmed with a winter’s worth of dog turds, pale and crumbled

among the pale remaindered weeds.

But it does shine, that fool’s orb, for reasons best known to itself;

and I slouch here in my yellow chair, both cold feet

parked under the woodstove, squinting into this cheerful, bossy glare,

attempting to convince myself that unbridled nature

has, for once, chosen to be a genial master instead of the flogging brute

we expect here in the ugly town, where we don’t think

ski but shovel, don’t think flowers but floods.

Maybe I’ve been reading too many books—

too much Roth and Munro, too much Blake and Carruth,

all of them driven to detail bleak empty roads

and unmown lawns; evil alleys and poisonous rivers;

the fathers, dyspeptic, misunderstood; the mothers,

wiping schmaltz and ketchup from the shabby oilcloth; and meanwhile

those thirteen angels on their magic seats, frowning and perturbed.

Of course there’s happiness too. No one denies the happiness,

but don’t count on it to carry you through. Keep your eye

steady, your irony sharp. Stay wary; it’s best to stay wary—

though not one of these writers, I can tell you right now,

has ever stayed wary enough, and they’ve paid for it in spades—

a phrase that might, for dwellers of another clime,

connote cognac and midnight whist parties

but that here, in the ugly town, where most everyone

gambles by scratch ticket and goes to bed early,

means plain old digging:

in snow, in thankless stony soil, with a bent shovel,

with a belching backhoe; tearing up asphalt,

forking out a winter’s worth of choking black shit.

You can kill yourself when you pay in spades

for a neat square cellar hole—say, when you’re fifty years married

to a woman who’s dreamed for all those heavy decades

of trading her wind-licked trailer for a house with a furnace.

No, you haven’t had time, you haven’t had money,

all you’ve had is a middle-aged kid who won’t get out of the recliner

except to grab a beer from the icebox, all you’ve had

are those cars, one after the other, falling into seizures and dismay;

and if you can’t stop eating what you shouldn’t be eating,

at least there’s salt, there’s sugar, those reliable offerings

that remind you you’re still alive, that you haven’t yet

paid out every single spade. Yet it’s a lie, and you know it,

and I know it too because I tell my own brand of lies,

such as it’s okay to be easy on myself,

such as I mean well, such as it’s good enough

to chronicle the sweetness of this sunlight,

not to force myself to keep struggling to speak

when I don’t know how to think, when I don’t know how

to find the word, the only word, trembling, naked as a rat,

when I don’t know how to lay it down, wet and mewling,

among the schmaltz and the ketchup stains.

Someone might argue that here’s where a little wariness

would do me good, and not just me but all these writers

whose books I’ve been reading too often,

and even they might agree with you, on a bad morning.

But today, according to this obstinate sun, is not a bad morning.

Brilliance leaks and flows through window smears,

patches the dour carpet. The light refuses to let up.

It insists on itself, like a mean cat does,

gliding from nowhere to bite me on the ankle.

The world is too much with us; late and soon

is what Wordsworth wrote, but it’s not what he meant.

He was trying to say we were too distracted by our lives

to notice this sunshine, and here I am borrowing his words

to explain that I am too distracted by this sunshine

to notice my life. The world overtakes me,

I’m not wary enough, and something bad will happen

if I don’t watch out. That’s the point to remember about writing.

It doesn’t solve anything.

[first published in New Walk (autumn/winter 2010-11)]

Landscape, Justice, Activism, Ambiguity: or Where Do Poems Come From?

I'm editing a mesmerizing yet distressing book about uranium production in the Colorado Plateau--a book that mentions, for instance, that "industry privatization, de- and re-regulation of related frameworks, and corporate self-monitoring are just some of the neoliberalized traits of the uranium industry." (Always good attitudes, eh?--and even better when radioactivity is involved. Ay yi yi.) But the author also talks about the clear class divide between the people who live in a region that depends on natural resources as an industry and the people who campaign for those natural resources as vital and important in their own right. I see this in the north woods as well: the ire that erupts between fourth-generation loggers and activists who want to turn working forests into parks. Yet, of course, the locals are always getting screwed by the corporations; the locals always live at the whim of the market; the locals are always the ones left with the Superfund sites and the cancer clusters.

One might claim to perceive a clear right and wrong in such situations. But the people of a region have more than economic ties to the natural resources they are hired to dig up or cut down. They are culturally bound to that labor: by family and community history, by stanza and story. Without mining we would have no Clementine. Without logging we would have no Paul Bunyan. Do stories matter when a landscape is at sake? No, and yes.

To me, such deep ambiguities are self-evident, but they are not so obvious to many activists. I say this as a person who almost always supports progressive causes, both environmentally and socially: I am a staunchly liberal voter. But I also recognize that, in large part, the fracking haters and wolf lovers do not live on the piece of land that will be directly affected by fracking or wolves. Those activists who do live there are often relative newcomers, not people with long cultural ties to the region. Does this make their arguments wrong? No, of course not. But these activists often tend to assume that the locals who cling to an industry are serfs cowed by corporate greed rather than individuals with histories and perspectives.

It is painful to be a poet who lives on both sides of this divide, and I have found myself writing so much about these people who are me, and also not me. My poems solve nothing, but at least they allow me to map the complications.

Ugly Town

Dawn Potter

The sun is under no obligation to shed its optimistic beams

on the ugliest town in Maine—not now, not in March

when I’ve steeled myself for gravel-picked mud and despair,

for broken branches and a plow-scarred dooryard

rimmed with a winter’s worth of dog turds, pale and crumbled

among the pale remaindered weeds.

But it does shine, that fool’s orb, for reasons best known to itself;

            and I slouch here in my yellow chair, both cold feet

parked under the woodstove, squinting into this cheerful, bossy glare,

            attempting to convince myself that unbridled nature

has, for once, chosen to be a genial master instead of the flogging brute

we expect here in the ugly town, where we don’t think

ski but shovel, don’t think flowers but floods.

Maybe I’ve been reading too many books—

too much Roth and Munro, too much Blake and Carruth,

all of them driven to detail bleak empty roads

and unmown lawns; evil alleys and poisonous rivers;

the fathers, dyspeptic, misunderstood; the mothers,

wiping schmaltz and ketchup from the shabby oilcloth; and meanwhile

            those thirteen angels on their magic seats, frowning and perturbed.

Of course there’s happiness too. No one denies the happiness,

but don’t count on it to carry you through. Keep your eye

steady, your irony sharp. Stay wary; it’s best to stay wary—

though not one of these writers, I can tell you right now,

has ever stayed wary enough, and they’ve paid for it in spades—

            a phrase that might, for dwellers of another clime,

connote cognac and midnight whist parties

but that here, in the ugly town, where most everyone

gambles by scratch ticket and goes to bed early,

means plain old digging:

in snow, in thankless stony soil, with a bent shovel,

with a belching backhoe; tearing up asphalt,

forking out a winter’s worth of choking black shit.

You can kill yourself when you pay in spades

for a neat square cellar hole—say, when you’re fifty years married

to a woman who’s dreamed for all those heavy decades

of trading her wind-licked trailer for a house with a furnace.

No, you haven’t had time, you haven’t had money,

all you’ve had is a middle-aged kid who won’t get out of the recliner

except to grab a beer from the icebox, all you’ve had

are those cars, one after the other, falling into seizures and dismay;

and if you can’t stop eating what you shouldn’t be eating,

at least there’s salt, there’s sugar, those reliable offerings

that remind you you’re still alive, that you haven’t yet

paid out every single spade. Yet it’s a lie, and you know it,

and I know it too because I tell my own brand of lies,

such as it’s okay to be easy on myself,

such as I mean well, such as it’s good enough

to chronicle the sweetness of this sunlight,

not to force myself to keep struggling to speak

when I don’t know how to think, when I don’t know how

to find the word, the only word, trembling, naked as a rat,

when I don’t know how to lay it down, wet and mewling,

among the schmaltz and the ketchup stains.

Someone might argue that here’s where a little wariness

would do me good, and not just me but all these writers

whose books I’ve been reading too often,

and even they might agree with you, on a bad morning.

But today, according to this obstinate sun, is not a bad morning.

Brilliance leaks and flows through window smears,

patches the dour carpet. The light refuses to let up.

It insists on itself, like a mean cat does,

gliding from nowhere to bite me on the ankle.

            The world is too much with us; late and soon

is what Wordsworth wrote, but it’s not what he meant.

            He was trying to say we were too distracted by our lives

to notice this sunshine, and here I am borrowing his words

            to explain that I am too distracted by this sunshine

to notice my life.  The world overtakes me,

            I’m not wary enough, and something bad will happen

if I don’t watch out. That’s the point to remember about writing.

           It doesn’t solve anything.

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)

Ugly Town

Dawn Potter

The sun is under no obligation to shed its optimistic beams

on the ugliest town in Maine—not now, not in March

when I’ve steeled myself for gravel-picked mud and despair,

for broken branches and a plow-scarred dooryard

rimmed with a winter’s worth of dog turds, pale and crumbled

among the pale remaindered weeds.

But it does shine, that fool’s orb, for reasons best known to itself;

            and I slouch here in my yellow chair, both cold feet

parked under the woodstove, squinting into this cheerful, bossy glare,

            attempting to convince myself that unbridled nature

has, for once, chosen to be a genial master instead of the flogging brute

we expect here in the ugly town, where we don’t think

ski but shovel, don’t think flowers but floods.

Maybe I’ve been reading too many books—

too much Roth and Munro, too much Blake and Carruth,

all of them driven to detail bleak empty roads

and unmown lawns; evil alleys and poisonous rivers;

the fathers, dyspeptic, misunderstood; the mothers,

wiping schmaltz and ketchup from the shabby oilcloth; and meanwhile

            those thirteen angels on their magic seats, frowning and perturbed.

Of course there’s happiness too. No one denies the happiness,

but don’t count on it to carry you through. Keep your eye

steady, your irony sharp. Stay wary; it’s best to stay wary—

though not one of these writers, I can tell you right now,

has ever stayed wary enough, and they’ve paid for it in spades—

            a phrase that might, for dwellers of another clime,

connote cognac and midnight whist parties

but that here, in the ugly town, where most everyone

gambles by scratch ticket and goes to bed early,

means plain old digging:

in snow, in thankless stony soil, with a bent shovel,

with a belching backhoe; tearing up asphalt,

forking out a winter’s worth of choking black shit.

You can kill yourself when you pay in spades

for a neat square cellar hole—say, when you’re fifty years married

to a woman who’s dreamed for all those heavy decades

of trading her wind-licked trailer for a house with a furnace.

No, you haven’t had time, you haven’t had money,

all you’ve had is a middle-aged kid who won’t get out of the recliner

except to grab a beer from the icebox, all you’ve had

are those cars, one after the other, falling into seizures and dismay;

and if you can’t stop eating what you shouldn’t be eating,

at least there’s salt, there’s sugar, those reliable offerings

that remind you you’re still alive, that you haven’t yet

paid out every single spade. Yet it’s a lie, and you know it,

and I know it too because I tell my own brand of lies,

such as it’s okay to be easy on myself,

such as I mean well, such as it’s good enough

to chronicle the sweetness of this sunlight,

not to force myself to keep struggling to speak

when I don’t know how to think, when I don’t know how

to find the word, the only word, trembling, naked as a rat,

when I don’t know how to lay it down, wet and mewling,

among the schmaltz and the ketchup stains.

Someone might argue that here’s where a little wariness

would do me good, and not just me but all these writers

whose books I’ve been reading too often,

and even they might agree with you, on a bad morning.

But today, according to this obstinate sun, is not a bad morning.

Brilliance leaks and flows through window smears,

patches the dour carpet. The light refuses to let up.

It insists on itself, like a mean cat does,

gliding from nowhere to bite me on the ankle.

            The world is too much with us; late and soon

is what Wordsworth wrote, but it’s not what he meant.

            He was trying to say we were too distracted by our lives

to notice this sunshine, and here I am borrowing his words

            to explain that I am too distracted by this sunshine

to notice my life.  The world overtakes me,

            I’m not wary enough, and something bad will happen

if I don’t watch out. That’s the point to remember about writing.

           It doesn’t solve anything.

[Forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014). This poem first appeared in the British journal New Walk. I'm told J. M. Coetzee liked it a lot. As I spend my day shopping at the Bangor Mall, I will attempt to keep saying to myself, "I wrote a poem that J. M. Coetzee liked, I wrote a poem that J. M. Coetzee liked." Any port in a storm, eh?]

A couple of weirdnesses. I did my exorcism reading at the Frost Place and then opened my email, from which I learned that Guernica wants to publish "Son-in-Law" and that an NPR affiliate in Santa Cruz has recorded "Ugly Town." Two hard-to-take Harmony poems in one fell swoop. If you happen to have been in the Frost barn during my reading, you'll know why this all seems so strange and, yes, unnerving. If you weren't there, I'll explain that I wrote "Son-in-Law" at about this time last year and that its characters are based on my friend Linda and her son-in-law Steven Lake, who murdered Linda's daughter and grandchildren a couple of weeks ago. And "Ugly Town" appeared in the British journal New Walk last year. It's the poem J. E. Coetzee is rumored to like, which adds yet another layer of je-ne-sais-quoi to the situation. I haven't listened to the recording, but Ruth tells me the reader is sweeter-tempered about the poem than I tend to be.

Sometimes, out of the blue, people write to me about my books. It always, always feels like a miracle. And when the letter is like this one . . . well, I don't even know how to respond. Every time I try to speak, my eyes fill with tears.

Finally, this weekend, I received my copy of Same Old Story and finished it last night. Truth in advertising, Dawn, because this ain't the Same Old Story at all. This strikes me as a real departure for you, a real act of bravery, a real willingness to forego the earlier virtues and write very new Dawn Potter poems. There seems to be twists and turns in the language and in the push of the poem that you would not have made, or dared to make, before. I could give you lots of examples, but the individual cases are not to the point, it is the whole way of working and talking that I believe you are shifting. And change in and of itself is not great shakes, but these changes are changes in authority, in vision, in the desire to make language a different tool and they work remarkably well. 

I love the sheer balls of White Bear and the fact that it is in the same book as Spring on Ripley Road. I love the assertion and counterassertion of Ugly Town, the poem that absolutely undercuts itself as the light undercuts the ugliness of the town. There is a daring here and then an execution that is really remarkable. 

You were a remarkable poet, Dawn, before but you are reaching and pulling down new things that are very, very powerful. I admire this book and your enterprise in it very deeply.

I'm reading in Orono today, but will anyone come? Obama did have to choose today to make an appearance in Portland.

Ah well. I will read to the robins.

I'm going to perform a new, unpublished, never-before-read-aloud-in-public poem. It's called "Ugly Town." There's plenty in it about mud and digging, but I hope the literary references won't annoy the robins.

I am relieved to tell you that Tom and I have finally found a place to live in Portland. I am amazed to tell you that this is the view from the front window:

Thanks to a gallery connection of Tom's, we lucked into an affordable second-floor apartment on the Eastern Promenade. The apartment has one gorgeous room, a couple of perfectly fine rooms, and a terrible tiny kitchen. But it has space for a version of our stuff, and space for a few visitors, and space for Ruckus, and once I spent a year cooking in a kitchen that didn't even have a sink so this kitchen is 100 percent better than that one.

Amusingly, the most beautiful room in the apartment is our bedroom. It has a fireplace, and a view of the sea, and a deck with room for chairs and flowers, and a window seat. I said to Tom that we will have to be like Colette and entertain in our boudoir. It would not be fair to keep visitors out of that room.

I know we can't limit ourselves to three rooms forever, but already the prospect of living in a place this beautiful makes us feel as if we're going on vacation for a year. I suppose after twenty years in the ugly town it's okay to take a break and pretend that we're the kind of people who are accustomed to living in Victorian houses by the sea. My north-country Puritan conscience thinks otherwise, but I'm working to squelch him.

Later today I head down to Portland, where I'll be reading at the Beloit Poetry Journal's Maine Poetry Gala, held at Space Gallery tonight at 7 p.m. Other featured poets include Jeffrey Thomson, Betsy Sholl, Martin Steingesser, and Elizabeth Tibbetts.

The magazine's editors asked us to read a poem that's been published in Beloit, so I've decided to read a section or two from "Mr. Kowalski," a long poem about violins and failure and the Holocaust that I have not revisited very recently. It will be odd to say the words aloud again.

And probably I'll read something from the Chestnut Ridge manuscript because I know Betsy Sholl likes those poems. Or maybe instead I'll read "Ugly Town" from Same Old Story because it explains why I feel so lonely at literary parties. I'll leave it to the gods to make the decision.

On Saturday I will drive home and then go directly to a high school track meet. On Sunday I will play music at Stutzmans' Cafe. On Monday I will teach K-8 poetry all day. On Tuesday I will sit quietly on my stoop and watch the cat roll around in the driveway.

And now I will read this.



Prayer (I)

George Herbert

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,

            Gods breath in man returning to his birth,

            The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinners towre,

            Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

            The six-daies world-transposing in an houre,

A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,

            Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,

            Heaven in ordinarie, Man well drest,

The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

            Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,

            The land of spices; something understood.

Yesterday's reading went well. The bank was packed: there were no chairs left to sit on, and that never happens at poetry readings. People were kind listeners, and responsive. But reading poems about central Maine while standing in bank on the Upper West Side just made me feel so bizarre, like I was performing in a freak show or something. The world of "Ugly Town" was so far away from these listeners. I felt, as I read, that rural poverty was weirdly one-dimensional to them . . . a vision of Tea Party Republicans and fundamentalist preachers and deer rifles and four-wheelers and smelt fishing and clear-cutting: a world of redneck paper dolls. But I live in that place. And they live in a place where Yoko Ono has an apartment around the corner.

Update: I just got an email from one of the other poets at last night's reading, who told me he was worried that his poems weren't dark enough and that people could tell his mouth was dry . . . at which point I started laughing and decided not to delete this silly post. It seems that poets come out of their holes just long enough to feel like idiots, and then dive in again. It's good for you to see us in all our glory.

I've just returned from the post office, where I off-loaded the last parcels of cookies and black cake (see my previous post about black cake, in case you are confused about what this might be) as well as the manuscript I've been editing. (No doubt, the author believes that he is on vacation and will be disappointed to receive it.)

So now it is officially the Holiday Season. And to open the Season, I today received a friendly Christmas card from someone I don't know who lives in a faraway state and says that her library will buy the Milton memoir when it comes out. This is so amazing to me . . . a miracle, really, as I told her in my return card. To think that people read what I write! I know I sound disingenuous; but really, if you saw how I live, you might understand what I mean.

Here's a bit from chapter 2 of the memoir, as a sort of explanation. And thank you, thank you so much, whichever "you" you might be, for reading what I've written and for talking to me about it. It's good to be alone; it's good to be not alone too.

Stumbling into Harmony 

Thus was this place,

A happy rural seat of various view.

Perhaps one definition of paradise is that it’s a place that doesn’t dash your hopes. I arrived in Harmony when I was twenty-eight, newly married, newly unemployed, eager to find my place on earth. I came to the north country prepared to be happy, and I was happy.

            In this era of aimless migration and faceless commercial landscape, finding a real home on earth is a miracle. Yet any attempt to explain its succor risks transforming the homebody into a mouthpiece for provincial nostalgics or back-to-the-land politicos. For it’s very hard to explain a marriage, human or otherwise; and loving a place is like loving a husband or a cow or a baby or a grandfather: you make the best of it, you lose your temper, you throw up your hands in despair, you spin foolishly in circles, you take what’s been served, and you shut up.

            There’s nothing charming about Harmony. It squats in the middle of the state, far away from the ocean, far away from the ski lodges. It has no scenic New England charm: its school is ugly, its town office uglier. It has a rundown yarn factory that once appeared in a Stephen King movie. It also has plenty of gas pumps and three places to buy beer. During hunting season you can tag your buck here very easily. Any time of the year you can buy bar-and-chain oil for your chainsaw. If you drive a half-hour south, you can shop at Wal-Mart. If you drive an hour east, you can go to the mall.

            Clearly Harmony is not Brigadoon. Time has not forgotten us. This is a town that takes diesel seriously. Almost everyone watches a lot of TV and votes Republican. Junked pickups rust in the weeds, little children are horrifyingly fat, and men beat their wives. Mobile homes burn down. Trash piles up in the ditches. In my son’s seventh-grade class, one very nice Christian boy recently suggested it might be a good idea to shoot all Mexicans who cross the U.S. border.

I realize that, at this point in my description, Harmony sounds like the town a Harper's writer might conjure up as an emblem of backcountry rot, a dying hamlet cretinously sponging up the poisons of our time. Hell, in fact. But hell is not always hell. As Satan notes,

What when we fled amain, pursu’d and strook

With Heav’n’s afflicting Thunder, and besought

The Deep to shelter us? this Hell then seem’d

A refuge from those wounds.

Thomas Hardy once wrote that “melancholy among the rural poor arises primarily from a sense of incertitude and precariousness of the position.” And for the maimed, the scared, the defeated, the angry, the vengeful, a bleak backcountry can indeed be a place to lick your wounds, to ponder, to squirrel away the canned goods and the ammo. By a long shot, this doesn’t make it Eden; but Milton’s image of hell as refuge does offer some hint about the mutability of place in the human psyche. Like most overquoted lines, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” resonates because it strikes a familiar knell: because we are alone and changeable in all our colors and seasons; because we and our refuge are one and the same.

I've just learned from the journal editor that Nobel prizewinner J. M. Coetzee liked my poem "Ugly Town" in New Walk.

I'm feeling sort of dizzy.

Harmony Free Fair, Day 1

First, take my older son to the optometrist in Skowhegan. But since this means he'll be skipping school for the rest of the day, the plus side is that he'll be available as slave labor.

Stop at P.J.'s Party Store and see if she sells bunting that isn't red, white, and blue. What color of bunting might coordinate best with giant zucchinis? Mauve? Gold?

Return to town and, with my son, eviscerate the Harmony Country Store's storage shed. Debbie, the owner, offered me a rack for the Exhibit Hall, but it is hidden behind years' and years' and years' worth of Budweiser boxes. This is where the slave labor comes in handy.

Don my official blaze-orange Harmony Patriarchs Club T-shirt. (This is the town organization that runs the fair, and you may be surprised to learn that women can also be Patriarchs.) Reconnoitre with my husband, who will help me set up various warped tables and tottering display stands in the hall. We also have a nice selection of painted electric-company spools.

Pick up my younger son at school, facilitate him in his chicken-wrangling operations, haul his 3 chickens-plus-educational-poster to the small-animal barn. Start handing out money to my children so that they can begin their Friday-night fried-dough-and-soda odyssey.

Go home, collect band instruments and last-minute Exhibit Hall paraphernalia such as baling twine and staple guns. Return to the fairgrounds for the grand opening of the hall at 4 p.m., when the hordes arrive with their beets and Hubbard squashes and needlepoint Xmas ornaments and cute blurry photos of kittens.

Spend a couple of hours in a frenzy of vegetables, etc.

Hand over the hall to my substitutes because now I have to change out of the blaze-orange T-shirt. I'm damned if I'm going on stage in this ugly T-shirt. I'm too vain for that.

Sit in the audience and wince at Amplitude's bad notes and tuneless singing but cheer nonetheless: because this is my boys' rock band, and anyway I have to go on stage in the middle of the set and play a fiddle part and sing a song and play bass. Who knows what mistakes I'll make, but, like everyone, I hope for unconditional cheering.

Return to the Exhibit Hall at 7 p.m. in time to put up the closed sign and begin organizing exhibits for tomorrow's judging. Meanwhile, eat French fries.

Go home later than I meant to. Sit on the couch and drink beer.

Yesterday Tom and I crammed two loads of storm-damaged branches into a borrowed pickup, and he hauled them off to the dump. Then he came home and worked on the desk he's building, and I made some progress on a garden reclamation project.

On a strip of ground on one side of our driveway, some long-ago homeowner once tried to establish a perennial garden, even going so far as to make a stone stairway between our driveway and the neighbors'. But the plot has been neglected for years and is now a horrible mess of goldenrod, nightshade, burdock, maple saplings, rocks, and tree roots. For the past couple of months I have been keeping the weeds in check with a trimmer, and in the process I've uncovered some pathetic lilies and iris, a few unhappy rosebushes, and a limp peony. Now I've begun the next stage of garden recovery: spreading wheelbarrow loads of the compost-mulch I've been cooking since last fall. The mixture combines new soil from my two compost bins with last year's fallen maple leaves, which I had raked into a corner of the backyard and have been turning from time to time. My goal is to gradually spread a thick layer of the mixture on this ugly strip of ground, thus creating manageable and arable beds while suppressing the ferocious weeds. It's what a friend calls the pancake-makeup approach to gardening.

When I told Tom last fall that I was planning to keep all of the leaves that fell off our trees--and the trees are enormous, so there are many, many leaves--he was not enthusiastic, but he didn't argue. Still, I clung to what I hoped would be a good idea, though I wasn't sure the leaves would break down fast enough to be useful . . . or that I could get them out of the pile before the next batch of autumn detritus arrived. Yet here I am, less than a year later, with yards of fine free soil.

Chainsaws and giant compost piles: who knew how handy country-honed skills would be in the city?

Plus, after we finished working, we tidied up and took a long sweet walk into town for one of the best dinners out I've had in quite a while.

We're doing okay here.

Such heat here in Harmony, Maine! Last winter, I never thought we'd see summer again, and now we're enveloped in dense humidity, 90-degree temperatures, sweating drink glasses, warm ponds. . . . All my blog posts will be late because early morning is my only chance to work or exercise outside. On Sunday Tom and I got up at dawn and went canoeing on the lake here in town: watched the mists rise from still waters, listened to loons, floated among reeds and water lilies, ate a picnic breakfast on a granite island, capsized the canoe, had a run-in with said granite island (right leg is now quite ugly in a non-medical-emergency sort of way), laughed, drove home, and fell asleep for much of the afternoon. Yesterday morning I reamed out a vetch-infested iris bed; this morning I weeded, transplanted sunflowers, and mowed around the gardens. Tomorrow I turn my attention to the vegetable garden, and Thursday we're off to New York for a bacchanal wedding party. And next week, at long last, my life retreats to the pedestrian.

In the meantime, I am reading Iris Murdoch and Rilke, wearing linen, drinking unsweetened ice tea made with Twinings Lady Grey teabags (a fine and delicate flavor: recommended), eating Indian black-pepper rice (a lovely cold side dish: recommended), watching World Cup soccer (a waste of time but sort of recommended), and arguing with the cat (not recommended).

I'm girding my loins for Milton book promotion, a task I find nerve-wracking and unpleasant. I like giving readings, but somehow I feel like a used-car salesman when I start nudging people about venues and reviews. Nonetheless, the nudging must happen. My town has no library, no bookstore, a population of 800, and very few readers. In fact, my entire county, which stretches from the middle of the state to the Canadian border, may have only one bookstore, and a bad one at that. I guarantee that it will not be buying a book about Paradise Lost. It's the kind of place that specializes in Consumer Reports and thick colorful puppy stories for teething babies to chew on.

So if you happen to be influential with a bookstore or a library, please let the buyer know that UMass is currently taking orders. I just finished checking the second batch of proofs, and they should be going to the printer shortly, with publication officially slated for May, though I hear the books may be available sooner.

I'm also beginning to schedule readings, so let me know if you're interested in setting up a date.

And if you're associated with a journal and would like a review copy, let me know as well so I can pass on that information to the press.

By the way, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your kindness and intensity as commentators and readers. Really, you don't have to buy a book: I'm grateful anyway. (See what a bad salesman I am? I should stop talking. And yes, I know I'm not a "man," but "salesperson" has such ugly rhythm and those obnoxious repetitive "s" sounds.)

Yesterday evening, before dark, I walked around Back Cove with a friend whom I've loved since she was three, and we talked about men and politics and ducks and parents and movies and how terrifying a screaming rabbit sounds at night in the woods. Every few weeks this friend texts me and asks me to go for a walk with her, and I can't tell you how much pleasure that gives me. Just being sought out by a young person: it is sweet to me, in this era of loneliness for my boys.

From my study window, I can see the tips of lilies sprouting in a neighbor's yard. From the bedroom window, I glimpse the swelling buds of another neighbor's lilac. I wish my backyard could give them an equivalent hopefulness, but it remains blank and ugly.

I am listening to Tom fry an egg in the kitchen. Beside him, the radio news drones on and on, like a single-minded eel slipping through a river of garbage. And now Tom turns off the radio, and the sudden gap of silence fills with the dim roar of morning traffic and, closer, a sparrow chirping among the local maples.

The blue walls of my study reflect a chill and watery light, a pale north-facing dawn. At random I open the poems of Anna Ahkmatova, and she tells me:

The souls of all my loved ones are on high stars.
It's good there's no one left to lose,
And I can cry. The air in this town of the tsars
Was made to repeat songs, no matter whose.

Twenty-below this morning, which means thirty-below in the middle of town. The band's show at the East Sangerville Grange, scheduled for tonight, got canceled because the heating system can't hack the cold. This is a drag: we had such a good practice last night, and our friends were going to come hang around with us tonight, and they were going to eat cake and drink coffee, and Craig and I were going to sing a new song together, and now we're all disappointed.

Ah, well. Time to face the fact that my woodbox is almost empty. Time to dress like a toddler on a sled: double socks, heavy boots, snowpants, three coats, a thick scarf, an ugly hat, two pairs of gloves. That will barely get me through five minutes of fast outdoor work.

Somebody better make another pot of coffee while I'm gone.

I got home midday with a trunkful of plants from Angela's garden--mostly lilies but also bloodroot and a big sedum. As a result, I had to finally overcome my procrastination and start digging up the ugly strip of grass between sidewalk and street. I've been wanting to get rid of the grass since we moved in, but I've had too many other garden jobs to keep me busy. Plus, nursery stock is expensive, and the sidewalk plot is a tricky spot--always under onslaught from dogs, snowplows, and the Public Works Department--and it requires plants that will be hardy under difficult conditions, that won't flop too much over the sidewalk, that will spread thickly enough to be their own weed control, and that won't break my heart when a guy with a jackhammer shows up. I've got a lot of street frontage (for a city yard), and not enough plants to fill the entire strip. But Ang did give me enough for a good-sized patch, and so I settled down to the chore: I broke a big chunk of weedy sod, hacked the tangled lily plants into plantable bunches, and set them into their new roadside home.

This morning I've got to hang laundry, mow grass, catch up on some other stuff that I haven't remembered yet, and then this afternoon I'll be in class, leading the first session of the current round of my chapbook seminar. Meanwhile, T is going to a Sea Dogs game with a friend, and I am a little bit jealous as currently the top-three Red Sox prospects are playing in Portland, and I know they won't be in Double-A for long.

Last night we had a treat for dinner: T brought home soft-shell crabs from the fish market, the first of the season. So I soaked them in milk, then dredged them in flour and fried them up, and we ate them with yogurt and caper sauce, alongside roasted potatoes with green onions and a big salad of baby kale, charred shishito peppers, cherry tomatoes, and fresh mint. I love these first big handfuls of garden herbs . . . the new onions, the chives and garlic chives, the first sprigs of mint and parsley and sage. And the wintered-over kale is still going strong.

In just a few days I'll be heading down to Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited, and I am getting more and more excited. I don't know why I'm looking forward to this adventure so much, but I'm glad I am. . . I so often fret about traveling, but I'm straight-up thrilled about this trip. I keep pondering over all of the little details . . . how will I manage my toothbrush on the train? what books will I bring to read? how many meals do I need to pack for myself? where should it all fit into my backpack? And then once I get to Chicago, J has all kinds of fun planned--good food and a trip to the botanical gardens and maybe a White Sox game, and we're going to figure out his gardening situation, and we're going to hang out and tell jokes and admonish his misbehaving cats.

For now, though, I need to keep my head in the present tense: yard chores, class prep. And afterward, in the late afternoon, maybe I'll treat myself to a bike ride, and then I'll cook up some haddock for dinner, watch the evening clouds roll in, and imagine summer. "Durer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this." I don't even love the poems of Marianne Moore, but that line is always, always in my head.

Spring arrived yesterday--cool, breezy, but certainly spring. I spent the entire day outside: first, at the nursery buying plants; then home putting them in; and then, for the rest of the day, bagging brush, wheelbarrowing leaves, and generally trying to make something out of nothing in the dead zone of the back yard. Meanwhile, Tom reamed out the rickety shed, hauled crap to the dump, yanked out a prickly bush with a come-along, and discussed chainsawing some ash and maple saplings that are growing in all the wrong places. Right now, we are still in destructo mindset: we can't improve the back yard until we get rid of the random tree growth and deal with our own construction detritus and the garbagy leftovers of the previous inhabitants.

But the front yard is coming along nicely. I'm still waiting for soil for the new bed, but yesterday I planted a small parsley and rosemary hedge, planted a small lavender hedge, hauled rocks for a miniature retaining wall along the sidewalk, planted mint in a beautiful blue pot, and wedged some creeping thyme into the crevices of a stone wall. My peas are in, and I have planted beets, arugula, cilantro, dill, lettuces, and radishes. The garlic shoots are glowing, and tulips are budding. Yesterday, I had a long talk with my friendly gardening neighbor, who tells me that this area of town is well known for its rich soil and easy growth. After twenty years spent gardening in a hard climate and on fir-shaded ledge, I don't know if I can handle such ease. Good thing I have an ugly back yard to keep me from swooning.

This isn't much of a photo, I know, but I'm not much of a photographer. Still, maybe you can see the outlines of what's to come in this bed. There will be a hedgerow of shrubby herbs along the right side; the green visible in the center is my garlic; the other patches of green are tulips planted by a previous occupant. At the back is the blue pot of mint. At the front, where you can just glimpse the terracing, are more tulips, some lavender, and, if the seeds sprout, a row of black-tipped ornamental grass. On the left, beside the foundation, are hyacinths and tulips and, eventually, I think, there will be dahlias. Closer to the front is a new bed waiting for a soil delivery. It will mostly be vegetables, with screens along the walkways of low sunflowers and ornamental grass.

Anyway, that's the dream plan. We'll see if the squirrels and the weather and the insects and my dedication to weeding will allow some version of it to come alive.