Yesterday morning I rushed home from Portland (E. B. White did win, by the way; my predictions were correct!) and then rushed off to a high school track meet, which was eventually canceled because of torrential thunderstorms, and then rushed home (sodden) to make dinner, and then rushed through a nerve-wracking sewing project (which came out beautifully, I'm relieved to say), and then finally stopped rushing, all of which explains why I did not write to you yesterday.

In contrast to yesterday's flurry, this morning I woke up to discover that Tom had forgotten to buy coffee and that Ruckus had left a dead mouse on the living room rug. Then I managed to open a door into my head, and now I feel a lumpy bruise ripening under my left eyebrow.

Today will be the day that my older son catches a plane to France. He is so happy. I do not want to distract him by growing a giant black bruise under my left eyebrow. I would prefer to have him remember me as the mother who swiftly transformed his favorite worn-and-torn Goodwill paisley shirt into a handsome short-sleeved shirt suitable for cafe and boulevard wear.



Blue in Green

Dawn Potter

Talk about art being its own worst

story: once I made the mistake

of playing Kind of Blue to snare

a baby into slumber.

Compare the crime

to those water-green lilies that teachers

Scotch-tape over the reading corner.

Now picture Monet shuffling the hallways

among our fluorescent children.

He would die of remorse. Meanwhile,

I knifed Miles for the sake of an hour’s

enchanted sleep. Who knew how soon

that breathing baby would light out

screaming into the blue?

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

This morning, two days before the first of June, the thermometer hovered at 32 degrees. Although the house shingles and the car windshield were lightly coated with frost, the garden seems to be undamaged. Still, it's not exactly thriving in this cold spring. All of the plants are tiny, bright green, and refrigerated. Even the blackflies are refrigerated, which is a minor plus. But on the whole, I'd rather be warm and bitten.

So instead of filling baskets with fresh lettuce, I've been drafting an essay about women, poetry education, and changing definitions of the academy. I've been checking proofs for a publisher and receiving many rejection letters. I've written a couple of new poems: one for the western Pennsylvania project, one unrelated. I've been rereading Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf and making my way through Betsy Sholl's new poetry collection, Otherwise Unseeable. I've been thinking about writing a essay that centers on recent books by Maine women poets: not only Betsy's but also Lee Sharkey's Calendars of Fire and Weslea Sidon's The Fool Sings. I've been composing introductions for this year's Frost Place faculty poets and planning a pilot writing workshop for a local domestic-violence organization. I've been cheating on crossword puzzles and learning to sing Elvis Costello's "Alison" and Neil Young's "Powderfinger." I've been mowing grass and mulching raspberries and pruning lilacs. I've been taking the excitable dog-cat posse for walks in the forest, and drinking too much coffee with my college boy, and sighing about the embarrassing Red Sox with my high school boy, and beating Tom at cribbage. I've been applying for jobs and applying for grants and coaxing people to sign up for the teaching conference and fretting about what to wear to this awards ceremony tonight. I've been falling asleep during every single TV show I try to watch. I've been waking up at 2 a.m. and listening to owls and sinking into dreams in which Maine's terrible governor has transmogrified into a terrible elementary school principal. I've been rising at dawn and fixing yet another pot of coffee and watching the mist rise over clotheslines loaded with wet clothes, over a chicken-less chicken house, over the phosphorescent blooms of the plum tree. Time slips on.

News, Etc.

* Tomorrow afternoon I drive down to Portland for the 2014 Maine Literary Awards ceremony. A Poet's Sourcebook is one of three finalists in the anthology category. The ceremony is open to the public, and there will be snacks and a bar, and you could come too. My competition includes a collation of Portland-area poets, collected by the city's current poet laureate, and a medley of E. B. White's writings about dogs, compiled by his granddaughter. It seems likely that E. B., though dead, would be the judges' favorite for almost any award, but I shall attend nonetheless. I am fond of his writings about dogs, and I like the Portland-area poets too.

* The weather is cold and wet and cold and wet. Yes, it's May 28, and, yes, I started a fire in the woodstove this morning. Blah. On the bright side, the four loads of laundry hanging on the line just got a second rinse.

* Applications for the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching close on May 31. So apply, apply, apply! Please feel free to email me at ironduke at tdstelme dot net if you have any questions.

* Rhubarb grows very well in weather that is cold and wet and cold and wet. Thus far, my family is not sick of rhubarb desserts, but I am beginning to worry.

* On June 12 at 12:45 p.m., I'll be reading at Bryant Park in NYC with two other CavanKerry Press poets: January Gill O'Neil and Teresa Carson. This will be my first visit to the metropolis in years. I'm turning it into a holiday jaunt with my sixteen-year-old, and we are very excited. So come to our reading and meet my darling beanpole.

* The beanpole tells me that he would rather visit the Cloisters than Coney Island.

* My husband Tom is one of the featured photographers in a show at the Kingman Gallery in Deer Isle. If you're wandering up and down the Maine coast wondering what to do with yourself, you could go look at his pictures.

* Here is one of Tom's photographs. It is not in the Kingman show but was part of a photo slideshow/poetry reading that we concocted together a few years back.

I had a banner day at the Bangor Goodwill yesterday: six books and a beautiful $9.99 leather jacket. My book haul was mostly contemporary fiction by writers whose books I've been meaning to read: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Nicholson Baker's Vox. I also added to my Margaret Drabble collection with The Witch of Exmoor and found a lovely tiny Nelson Classics edition of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. My best find was Edith Hamilton's Mythology, one of my childhood obsessions. My mother owned a ramshackle paperback that I more or less destroyed with rereading. I've since tried to find my own copy but could only track down an edition that had been misbound so that large stretches of pages repeated each other. But yesterday, waiting meekly among the Lance Armstrong biographies, was a beautiful hardcover, dust jacket intact. I cannot wait to read it again.

Is it not possible--I often wonder--that the things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it--the past--as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past.

--Virginia Woolf, quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf: A Biography

"What shall I do?" she cried; but already, as her stricken parents

          begged her to stay, she had snatched up her cloak,

flung it over her shoulders, and mounted the dancing mare,

          who galloped headlong into the fog and vanished

before the father could gather strength or wits to hold her.

--from my poem "The White Bear," in Same Old Story

I am the daughter of a generation of ambitious women who believed that an education would set them free, who assumed that marriage could be a holy partnership of sex and security, who expected to glory in child rearing, who saw no reason why they couldn’t be artists as great as Shakespeare, if only they could drive themselves hard enough into the work. The end results featured various versions of disaster and disappointment. Some of these women did carve out long and illustrious careers—though, very often, as men have done for so many thousands of years, they succeeded at the expense of those who loved and depended on them. Others exploded like fire bombs. But most, for better or worse, made a compromise with mediocrity, trading the pursuit of greatness for family or financial stability; giving up restless exhaustion for a semblance of peace. This last is not necessarily a bad ending. Yet a child watches her parents, and their disappointments and distresses become their legacy. And an anger remains, dormant mostly, but wreaking its own damages.

--from an essay I'm writing

My son managed to capture this portrait of the indigo bunting that's been flitting around our feeder for the past several days. After a winter of little gray chickadees and nuthatches, the window view is a feast of color . . . rose-breasted grosbeaks, goldfinches, purple finches, and now this glorious shy visitor.

My son is also a feast of color, bustling around the house in his funny loud pants and his Goodwill hats with comic punchlines and his silly ironic t-shirts, drinking coffee, playing with his camera equipment, teasing the cat, hugging the dog, fixing his bike, eating all of the snacks, charming his parents. He has been home from college for a week and in less than a week will be flying off again, this time to Paris for a film class. He is an almost-twenty-year-old in all of his plumage, and every glimpse of him gives me joy and a pang of loneliness.

In his review of Same Old Story, Nick Schroeder seemed to particularly like the poem I posted here yesterday, "No Day Is Safe from News of You." I was pleased that he liked it because the poem is one of my own favorites in the collection, though I've never been sure that it would necessarily attract anyone else.

"No Day Is Safe from News of You" is a conversation poem. That is, during its construction, I viscerally felt its structure and images develop as I was immersed in the work of another poet. My partner in the conversation was Sylvia Plath, and in fact my title is a line from her poem "The Rival."

While I intensely admire many of Plath's poems, I don't always (even usually) admire her as a human being; and this tension always infects my interactions with her poetry. I'm also afraid of her. As Hermione Lee writes about Virginia Woolf, "I think I would have been afraid of meeting her. I am afraid of not being intelligent enough for her.  Reading and writing her life,  I am often afraid (or, in one of the words she used most about her mental states, 'apprehensive')  for her."

"No Day Is Safe from News of You" is an important poem to me because, as I drew together its threads, I felt Plath's presence as a colleague, a seeker, an equal. This sounds hubristic, but it is not. I am not saying that my poem is as good as a Plath poem. Rather, in those moments of our poetic conversation, I was not afraid of her, and she was not derisive about me.