Yesterday afternoon I emailed the manuscript of my anthology to the publisher. At well over 500 pages long, this is the largest book I have ever created. Its dates span 850 B.C.E. to the present; the writers included come from all over the world; it features essays, poems, songs, letters, journal entries, interviews, and scripts. Of course, like any anthology, it is as limited as it is expansive. I was unable to forge a rights trail to several works I would have liked to reprint or find reliable or affordable translations of others. Authors would not respond to my requests; publishers charged absurd fees. On the other hand, a famous poet told me that I could reprint his essay if I sent him a bottle of good Scotch, and several people wrote beautiful pieces especially for this volume. It was exciting to collect such a compendium, to be in charge of deciding what would and would not make sense in this context, though of course I was always aware that my own predilections could not help but narrow its scope.

So now I just need to sit back and hope that people will read it. I still don't know if the book will be useful to anyone. Truly, the word useful is beginning to haunt me. What does it mean to a writer, a reader, an apprentice to the art? If this were a craft anthology, I might be able to invent an answer. But this is an anthology of "where poetry comes from." Inspiration is both quotidian and unexpected, and I haven't read a thing over the past year that's changed my mind about that.

from Rilke's letter to Lou Andreas-Salome, August 8, 1903

But I still lack discipline, the ability and the necessity to work for which I have longed for years. Do I lack the strength? Is my will sick? Is it the dream in me that inhibits all action? The days pass, and sometimes I hear the passing of life. And as yet nothing has happened, as yet nothing is real about me; I keep on dividing myself and flow apart,--I who want to run in one river-bed and become great. For it should be like that, shouldn't it, Lou: we should be like a river and not branch off into canals and bring water to the fields? We should, should we not, keep a grip on ourselves and storm ahead? Perhaps, when we get very old, once right at the end, we can let go, spread out and pour into a great delta.

Lately there have been a few articles floating around in the news about how to write an unfavorable book review, even whether or not one should write such a review. I haven't read any of these articles. But I did recently write a book review about a book I didn't like all that much, and I can verify how difficult it is to write fairly about a book that just doesn't appeal to the reviewer.

In my case, the book under review had been written by someone who seemed to be a perfectly amiable person, who was writing about an interesting subject, and who was in command of her prose. There was nothing wrong with this book . . . except that the author seemed to have missed the point. By the point, of course, I mean "my own special attraction to the subject"; and therein lies the difficulty. The author had not written the book that I wished she'd written. How, then, was I to frame the review? Should I merely write a good-tempered book report? Or should I note what was missing? Was it even fair to note what was missing? Why should her book have centered on a theme that apparently hadn't interested her?

I think back about the review I did write, and I fear that I wasn't fair. But I don't know what else I could have been. After all, a reader seeks for what speaks to her, and this book didn't speak to me.  However, I don't think I was unkind. I hope I wasn't.

James leaves for college in 10 days, and yesterday I watched Paul score the first soccer goal of his high school career. Tomatoes and corn are ripening. Grasshoppers are scratching and leaping in the patchy grass. Sunflowers lift their faces toward the sun; hummingbirds rumble at the feeder. Today I will bake bread and make sauerkraut, and vacuum the rug and wash the poodle, and mow grass and pick cucumbers, and read a novel about the Great Lexicographer.

Summer wanes.

I have not really been writing, though I have done flashes of significant and useful revising. The first western Pennsylvania poems are beginning to appear in journals, which reminds me of what I will need to be turning toward this fall, once my writing season begins again. Writing poems, canning tomatoes, splitting wood, hunting for honey mushrooms, shivering on the edges of soccer fields. Time leaps past me; time beckons me ahead.

Today is my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, which they will celebrate by doing a little hiking and exploring around their new home in Vermont. They met half a century ago at a small Presbyterian college in western Pennsylvania. My father, who had had his eye on my mother for a while, finally decided to get her attention by putting an ashtray on her head during a school assembly. Against all odds, this approach worked beautifully.

So here's a little poem for them.

Nostalgia

            Dawn Potter

It was darker then, in the nights when the cars

came sliding around the traffic circle, when the headlights

speckled with rain traveled the bedroom walls

and vanished; when the typewriter, the squeaking chair,

the slow voice of the radio stirred the night air like a fan.

Of course, the ones we loved were beautiful—

slim, dark-haired, intent on their books.

The rain came swishing against the lamp-lit windows.

The cat purred in his chair. A clock sang,

and we lay nearly asleep, almost dreaming,

almost alone, nearly gone—the days fly so;

and the nights, like sleep, disappear without memory.

[from Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004)]

Unity College and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art

cordially invite you to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Hawk & Handsaw.

Sunday, August 26, at 4:00 p.m.

Center for Maine Contemporary Art

162 Russell Avenue

Rockport, Maine 04856

With artist talks by

Meghan Brady

Avy Claire

Kenny Cole

Hannah Kreitzer

Freddy Lafage

Dawn Potter

Jeffrey Thomson

Following by a reception with light refreshments

RSVP to Kate Grenier kgrenier@unity.edu

or (207) 948-9121

Eclogue

Dawn Potter

All the long day, rain

pours quicksilver

down the blurred glass.

gardens succumb to forest,

half-ripe tomatoes cling

hopelessly to yellow vines,

cabbages crumple and split,

but who cares?

Let summer vanish,

let the tired year

shrink to the width

of a cow path,

soppy hens straggle

in their narrow yard,

and every last leaf

on the maples redden,

shrivel, and die.

Nothing needs me,

today, but you,

sweet hand,

cupping the bones

of my skull.  Alas,

poor Yorick, picked clean

as an egg.

How rich we grow,

bright sinew and blood,

my eyes open, yours

blue.

[from How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)]