So much snow shoveling, and then so much poetry. That basically sums up my Sunday. Apparently we got about a foot of snow, though I have no idea how anyone could measure that accurately as the drifts were 30 inches in front of my shed door and bare ground in patches across the road. Anyway, Tom and I carved our way out, and then I spent the afternoon in the advanced chapbook class, reading large chunks from collections by Maurice Manning and Vievee Francis and then writing and talking and thinking about how those excerpts might influence participant work.

Today I've got various things to do . . . prep for tomorrow's mentor session with my high school poet, and cogitate over a summer teaching offer, and set up a manuscript-consultation schedule, and clear my desk for the new editing project that's due to arrive at any moment. I ought to vacuum up the furniture-making wood chips that Tom tracked all over the house. This evening I'll hang out with my zoom poetry group and talk about poem revisions. I'm behind on my Aeneid reading, so I need to stake out some reading time. Probably a son will call to discuss football . . .

Tomorrow is February, and after February comes March, and in March my outdoor season begins again. I love my garden and love devoting time to it, but already I'm feeling breathless about the workload. I can do it, and I will do it, but gracious. Sometimes I wonder at myself. So I'm going to make a point of enjoying February, last hurrah of winter rest. If you can call what I'm doing now rest.

What a storm! I still have no idea how much snow we got: wind speed was high and the drifting severe. But our electricity never even blinked, so I spent much of the day cooking and reading, with a midday jaunt into the blowy. Tom and I and our across-the-street neighbors appeared to be the only hardy souls in town, waving at each other as we slogged into the ice-whipped gale. On the unplowed streets the only cars out were, of course, the exact cars that should not be driving in a blizzard: underloaded Econoline vans spitting snow on slight hills; elderly Cadillacs fishtailing around corners. This is a town crampacked with sensible Subarus, and not a one was on the roads.

Before the blizzard hijacked the schedule, Tom's parents had been planning to visit, and that meant I had a refrigerator full of dinner-party ingredients to use up on the two of us. So I made a giant snowbound feast. In the morning I put together a dessert I'd never tried before: a coconut blancmange--a milk-based gelatin, cousin to a pannacotta--which I served with creme anglaise. As you can see, it looked pretty spectacular when I unmolded it. 

For dinner I made one of Julia Child's leg-of-lamb recipes: painting a simple mustard-based sauce on the meat, then roasting to medium rare. (See more here about the incredible Maplemont lamb grown by master farmer Amber Reed, whom I've known since she was a kid.) Alongside it we had rice with wild mushrooms (from my autumn foraging) and bok choy with miso and fried sesame seeds. It was a top-notch meal, with significant leftovers, which is not a bad thing, considering that I'll be teaching this afternoon and immersed in a poetry workshop tomorrow evening and will be glad to have some quick options.

So today: much snow shoveling in the morning, much zooming in the afternoon. I'll let you know how it all goes.

At 6 a.m. only the faintest of flurries are brushing Casco Bay, but the winds are already coiling and strange. The cat is poised outside on the stoop, hackles raised, whiskers a-twitch. I know what he means: the air is peculiar; a thick, cold swirl, like a summer gale that's churning into ice cream.

Well, we have nowhere to go. This morning I'm going to make coconut blancmange, and read a lot of books, and stare out the window at the growing storm; and Tom will work in his shop on our bed frame; and Ruckus will burrow under a blanket and try to forget the whole thing.

Right now I'm in the midst of Plath's The Bell Jar, Pym's A Few Green Leaves, O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and Virgil's Aeneid. I'm still slowly copying out Dante's Inferno. I've got a stack of contemporary poetry collections I've been reading to prep for tomorrow's advanced chapbook seminar. I've also been reading contest submissions, though for the moment that pile is finished. It occurs to me that I would have no life if I went blind.

It also occurs to me that I might be writing the best poetry of my life right now.

Woke up this morning to learn that the little northern city by the sea is under a blizzard warning for Saturday--high winds, feet of snow, the whole shebang. We'd been looking forward to company this weekend, but my in-laws wisely canceled their visit to Maine. As a result I have a leg of lamb in the fridge, all of the ingredients for coconut blancmange with tangerine sauce, and nowhere to go, so as you can see I am fully prepared to hunker down.

[ . . . they survived for days on nothing but blancmange and an old bone . . . ]

Today will be yet another this-and-that fest. I'm starting a new class on Sunday, and a new editing project early next week, so I've been trying to finish reading chapbook manuscripts and otherwise catching up on the flying ends of my life. I'm pleased to report that I had an excellent night's sleep, so that has made everything brighter. And other than the disappointment about our visitors, I'm quite excited about the snowstorm. I'm not sure we've had a blizzard since we've been in Portland. The best thing is that Tom won't have to drive to work in it and make me scared all day. We can stay home together and stare out the windows and sometimes go for little breathless walks around the block and come home and take naps and enjoy ourselves.

The temperature is only 1 below zero here, so much warmer than everywhere else in northern New England. Harmony is 20 below; probably other places are worse. 

To top that off, Tom and I both had a terrible night's sleep: I had one hot flash after another, so bad that he finally went downstairs to sleep on the couch, where I could hear him having nightmares. Ugh. The sandman was not our friend.

Anyway, it's day now, and cold. But we have heat and coffee, so that's two checkmarks in the "good" column.

Today I'll be reading chapbook manuscripts and working on class prep and probably going to the grocery store and then late in the afternoon having a phone meeting about ways to publicize my next book because I need all the help I can get. Possibly I'll go out this evening to my poetry salon, though I haven't decided if I'm quite ready to take that step. Omicron levels have dropped precipitously in southern Maine, so likely it will be fine. But it's hard not to be nervous. More to the point, it's easy to be sedentary.

To tell the truth, I've been anxious this week, starting to second-guess the poems in the new collection, worried that, as usual, nobody will read or review the book, that like everything else I've written it will more or less fade into the forgotten. On the one hand, so what? On the other hand, why bother? But neither of those flippant, self-pitying reactions really gets at the heart of the matter . . . which is that a writer in solitude dreams of conversation.

I've been trying to post bits from the book here to make myself take that conversational leap. Though people rarely comment on them, I'm hoping that they occasionally ring a small chime for you.

(If I sound gloomy and self-lacerating, blame it on those all-night hot flashes.)

Disappointed Women

 

Dawn Potter

They lived in filth. Or were horribly clean. 

They piled scrapple onto dark platters.

They poured milk and ignored the phone.

 

They arranged stones on windowsills.

They filled lists and emptied shelves.

They dyed their hair in the sink.

 

One stored a Bible in the bathroom.

One hoarded paper in the dining room.

One stared at Lolita and stirred the soup.

 

When I say emptied I mean they wanted to feel.

When I say filled I mean they wanted to jump.

When I say bathroom, dining room, soup I mean

 

I washed my hands.

I sat at the table.

I ate what they gave me.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Yesterday morning, as I was sweeping fresh snow off my car and the walkways, one of my neighbors called out the door: "Would you like some hot chocolate-chip cookies?"

Has a snow shoveler ever heard a nicer question? I think not.

No cookie snow shoveling this morning, but it is 9 degrees out there, so maybe hot chocolate would be in order? I'm hoping to go for a walk later today with another neighbor, though I doubt we'll see the otters down at the cemetery ponds. There's not much open water these days, and I expect they've vamoosed to a stream.

It will be a cold week, with a big snowstorm forecast for Saturday. But the little house is warm, and we still have plenty of firewood in the basement. The luxury of basement firewood is considerable. In Harmony the logs trekked from woodshed to porch woodbox, from porch woodbox to stove woodbox, from stove woodbox to stove. Armload after armload, every day, in all weathers, three seasons a year. Basement firewood is dry, requires no coats or boots, and can be dealt with at any time of the day. Not to mention that mine is unnecessary for survival.

Today I've got a bunch of teaching-related stuff to do: emails and a Zoom meeting, prep for Sunday's seminar and Tuesday's mentor session. There are a couple of big manuscript projects looming, one a poet's full-length collection, the other a copyediting contract with a press, but for the moment I'm in more of a gather-up-the-loose-ends phase. I'm hoping to work on another poem draft today, and possibly do some submitting--not my favorite chore, but it must be done.

Here's a poem from the new collection . . . 

Dead Letter

 

I wish the world were too much with you.

I wish your river overflowed my bed.

I wish that time could call your number.

I wish my eyes were in your head.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, forthcoming)]

Snow this morning . . . not a lot, but enough to pretty the place up. Portland has not been looking its winter best since last week's rainstorm melted the snowpack down to bare earth. I'm happy to see the white again.

I spent most of yesterday working on a new poem draft--actually a massive expansion of a draft I began last fall during my Homer seminar, but so much of it is new that the piece now feels entirely different. I think it's a good start; the poem-story is moving into interesting places, and the imagery is surprising me. One thing I've been realizing: now that I live beside the sea, I am much more affected by classical sea metaphors and references. Homer the chronicler of islands feels very close to me now, in ways that he did not when I was an inlander.

I'm getting ready to teach an advanced chapbook class this weekend, a reunion of my very first chapbook cohort from last fall, so I've been thinking a lot about the way in which a poet's geography can control a collection. My own shift from forest to city-sea is a huge part of my forthcoming book, and was likewise a huge issue while I was trying to figure out how to organize the poems. Chronology made no sense, because geography also crosses emotional time. A cow poem, such as the one I posted yesterday, which arose from my mountain childhood, is also a geography, but not a plodding straight-ahead march from there to here. Grief and memory flit, dreamlike, through a landscape of their own.

Speaking of chapbook classes: this spring I'll be leading another session of Learning from Nina Simone: An Introductory Chapbook Seminar.  This will likely be the last time I'll run the class this year, and it's already half full, so if you're interested, please reach out ASAP. You don't need to be a published poet; all you need is a sheaf of close-to-finished pieces that you're beginning to treat as a unified group . . . or that somehow don't seem to go together . . . but then again maybe they do, and you're puzzled and curious, and want to start figuring them out. My approach is not to tell you the answer (news flash: there isn't one single answer) but to give you some tools for experimentation and introduce you to a supportive and attentive group of colleagues focused on the same task. Low stress, deep engagement. That's my goal.