Dawn Potter's Blog, page 6

I know all of northern New England has suffered from drou...

I know all of northern New England has suffered from drought this summer, but the Maine coast has been particularly stricken. Any rain in the interior never seems to make it to the edge. For instance, though the rest of you had rain yesterday, we did not get a single drop. It's sorrowful to watch the shrubs and trees shrivel into oblivion. Even a passing shower would have been respite. But the rain never comes.

Yesterday I finished Wajsbrot's Nevermore, read a friend's poetry collection, started Le Carre's Agent Running in the Field, and worked hard on a poem draft--exactly the day I was hoping to have. Today I'll do more reading and writing, and I'll also get started on my multistage firewood chore. Part 1 is wheelbarrowing the seasoned logs out of the woodshed and tossing them down the basement hatch. Part 2 is stacking the pile in the basement. Part 3 begins in September, when the delivery truck dumps a new pile of green wood in the driveway, and I wheelbarrow it into the shed where it will season for a year. Tom will help around the edges, after work and on the weekend, but mostly this is my job.

As firewood chores go, it's pretty minor, nothing like the endless forest-to-fire cycle of our life in Harmony. No cutting trees, no hauling them out of the woods, no chainsawing them into stove-length pieces, no splitting by hand or machine, no always being behind schedule, no snow-soaked work gloves and cranky trudging children. Still, even city firewood is a project. There's nothing easy about keeping a wood stove going.

What a lovely weekend! My in-laws are 100 percent fun and...

What a lovely weekend! My in-laws are 100 percent fun and sweet and doughty . . . we walked all over an island, walked all over downtown, ate great food, chattered and laughed, became melodramatic over a card game, cosseted Little Chuck, and generally amused ourselves greatly. I so appreciate their good humor, their curiosity, their easygoing restful attitude. It is an honor to be a daughter-in-law in this fine family.

And now it is Monday, and I feel like a person who has actually experienced a restorative weekend. This week I have little on my calendar, other than moving firewood into the basement (which, granted, is a significant project), going for a walk with a friend, and hosting my writing group for Little Chuck Night. So wish me luck with the writing and the reading because they are my primary goals.

I won't start the firewood chore today because we're supposed to maybe possibly who knows receive a dab of rainfall. Last night, from our restaurant window by the docks, we watched the shifting mackerel sky, the wind fluttering the water, and I hope they presaged a true turn in the weather. This drought is terrible.

For now, I am starting the day in my couch corner, with Little Chuck tucked against my shoulder and breathing confidingly into my ear. He, too, enjoyed the weekend company, and now he is full of contentment and breakfast. I've got Cecile Wajbrot's Nevermore to finish today, Sarah Ruden's small book on Plath to begin, Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard to reread, and a stack of books from yesterday's used-bookstore haunt a-waiting on the shelf (LeCarre, Lahiri, Toibin, Komunyakaa). And today I've got the warming memory of last week's essay acceptance,  I've got a clean and tidy study to work in. And maybe I'll have rain and maybe I'll have good fortune and maybe a few as-yet unknown words will fly up from silence and start humming and bumbling against one another, start murmuring back to me, start telling me a story.

* * *

There's still room in my upcoming Poetry Kitchen class. If you're out there not signing up because you (1) don't understand why anyone might try to experiment with long forms or (2) are struggling with self-confidence about whether or not you should take such a leap or (3) worry that everyone else in the class will already know what they're doing, please reach out and talk to me. As I think I've made clear in a few recent posts, taking the risk of working with long drafts changed me as a poet and as a human being.  I don't say this lightly.

We had a good day out on Great Diamond Island with my in-...

We had a good day out on Great Diamond Island with my in-laws. It is a strange place: one half is a delightful ramshackle ode to 1910s-era shingle-style cottages; the other half (known as Diamond Cove) is a 19th-century red-brick military installation that's been transformed into a prissy condo community. The difference is startling. But I do love the ramshackle half. On the last Saturday of summer, it had a quiet beach, a few kids on bikes, shady gravel roads, and lovely water views, all easily accessible from the ferry landing. Peaks and Long Islands are packed with day trippers, but this side of Great Diamond remains peaceful. Meanwhile, the Diamond Cove side sports restaurants, a wedding venue, day trippers galore . . . It's like the island has schizophrenia.

Back in Portland we stopped at the fish market and bought oysters and toro for dinner; we played cards, made a salad, drank a little wine, and entertained Chuck. It was a delightful Maine-coast day, and I am eager to go back to the charming side of the island with a picnic, a cribbage board, and a book.

It is fun, every once in a while, to treat Vacationland like vacationland. We live here, so it's easy to forget to play here. But Maine is a pretty fabulous place to loaf around in.

I'm not writing well or fluidly these days, though I keep...

I'm not writing well or fluidly these days, though I keep hammering out scraps of new work because that's my only way through these dead zones. This happens often during the summer and usually works itself out as the year wanes. I've always tended to do my best and most intense writing in the fall and winter. Once that made sense because the boys were back in school and I could find more time for myself. But I have no such explanation now; it's just become a seasonal pattern.

I could start focusing on putting together another poetry collection. I could even start thinking about an essay collection. However, I haven't shown any signs of propelling myself into either task. Instead I'm reading reading reading reading, and scribbling out a few unsatisfactory drafts, and drifting in and out of my quotidian chores and obligations. Call it a flotsam-and-jetsam period. I guess it's okay to be finishing nothing. I guess it has to be okay.

Still, these dry patches are hard. I feel more invisible than usual. I panic about whether or not anyone will--or even should--sign up for the classes I invent. I start comparing myself to my brilliant friends. Everyone else seems so vibrant, so full of words and ideas. I, meanwhile, am panting under the weight of Woolf and Whitman and the other lights who have made the work I long to make myself . . . and yet somehow, despite decades of striving, I have not managed to do what I crave to do.

But I had a huge and unexpected lift yesterday. Last fall, after Ray died, I wrote an essay about him, about our youth together, about the way in which our volatile friend group aged into a family constellation. I sent the piece out to a few places, and everyone rejected it. Then I stopped sending it out. And then, a few days ago, I tossed it back into the aether. Suddenly, yesterday, a response appeared in my inbox: yes, the editor would love to publish it. And then, at the end of his note, these words: "Dawn, do you know how great you are?"

I wanted to put my head down and cry . . . for Ray, for my own limping self-confidence, for the balm of these too-kind words. I am, of course, not great. Whitman is great. Woolf is great. I circle them, like a small and bedraggled crow. I wanted to put my head down and cry. The work is so hard. The sugar comes so rarely. The sweetness is so sweet.

Discovering the Long Poem

 Early in my poetry apprenticeship, my teacher, Baron Wormser, pointed out a few of my habits to me. I retreated to glibness and fancy forms to avoid exploring content. I equated revision with radical cutting. I wrote by ear. This last habit, he said, was one he would never question . . . and he never did. From the beginning he trusted my ear, and that was what taught me to trust it. But the other two habits? He was merciless with them. He pushed me into physical language and away from received forms, telling me I shouldn't, for instance, write sonnets until I had a better notion of them as a container rather than a mask. He told me to stop reading and imitating writers such as William Carlos Williams until I had a stronger sense of my own voice and what I needed to say. Exquisite brevity wasn't necessarily concision. Sometimes it was murder. For the first time, I began to recognize that brevity might be forcing me away from exploration.

It was Baron who pushed me into writing my first long poems. I was, in those years, very aware of myself as a failed novelist. My assumption was that I had failed because I didn't have the stamina to crank out the requisite number of words, that I had some fatal misunderstanding of plot construction. It took me years to understand that my inability to write prose fiction had nothing to do with stamina or plot weaving. It had to do with how I was hearing and reacting to language.

Still, I was frightened at the idea of writing a long poem, and the fact that I was a worshipper of the past wasn't helping me. Milton and Keats and Homer lurked in the weeds. What did I have to say that they hadn't said already? In short, I was yellow-bellied: I paced back and forth on the edge of the cliff, winced at the depth of the chasm, invented a hundred reasons not to jump. You know what I mean. I expect you've spent some hard times on that cliff edge too.

But I was so lonely in the woods, with T away all day and two little boys to care for. I was desperate to become myself, whatever that self might be. I was desperate to make something. Working with Baron had opened a door into that unknown country. You could be a poet, he told me, and I clung to that hope. I could become a poet, but I was not a poet yet. And so I had to leap.

I know this all sounds like inflated melodramatic elegy, but I have always lived in a private world of emotional overexcitement. And oddly enough, writing my first long drafts showed me that this emotional overload could, in itself, be an essential driver of a poem. A long draft gave me, for the first time, room enough to feel. I was not cutting myself short. I had no goal, other than to keep opening, opening, opening.

I also began to see that these long drafts were giving me the chance to bring multiple parts of my private life together . . . my daily labor in woods, barn, house; the uproars of children and love; my deeply personal reading patterns; my landscape; my family past; my national shames and worries; my unwieldy terrors and longings.

Of course great short poems can also incorporate these matters. Yet for me, the spaciousness of long drafts became a web that not only linked disparate elements but also caught flies--unexpected strangers swarming up from my imagination.

What if Whitman had ended "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" after part 1? He would have possessed a brief and attractive poem-portrait. As a short poem, it's sweet and evocative and pleasant to read. But he didn't choose to stop. He kept pushing himself forward. "And yet," he murmured to himself. "And yet."

The long poem is an opportunity to say, "And yet," not just once, not just twice, but a dozen times, or more. "I am large, I contain multitudes," he declared in "Song of Myself." So am I. So are you. Writing a long poem is a way to explore our selves.

***

My latest Poetry Kitchen offering is a two-weekend class on writing the long poem, with help from Whitman. If you've never written a long poem, if you're terrified of long forms, if you're an eager writer of long pieces, prose or poetry: this class is for you.

Forty-nine degrees this morning! Autumn has arrived with ...

Forty-nine degrees this morning! Autumn has arrived with a bang, and I am sporting my red bathrobe for the first time in months. Ruckus admired the red bathrobe very much, and I expect the new guy will like it too, one he gets his claws into it. Cats think polar fleece is extremely fashionable.

This chilly weather is reminding me that I've got to start moving firewood into the basement soon. I've got to pick up my winter coat from the dry cleaner. I've got to find a new heating-oil company pronto. And school is creeping closer and closer. Technically I've still got a month before classes start, but yesterday the Monson Arts staff met to discuss plans for our high school programs, and I'm starting to feel my schedule tighten.

But for the moment I'm still on summer time. We've got company coming this weekend, so today and tomorrow I'll be focusing on housework and food and Little Chuck hijinks. I'll get onto my mat, and I'll read, and I'll ponder my notebook of draft blurts, and I'll water my sad dry garden, and I'll go out to write tonight with my friends.

I'm happy to say that the Poetry Kitchen class is slowly starting to fill. I've been worried, and I'm grateful a few of you are taking the plunge with me. If nothing else, we'll have Whitman to keep us starry-eyed! Oh, that poem. I am in love.

Apparently we're supposed to get a drop of rain this morn...

Apparently we're supposed to get a drop of rain this morning, though only enough to make me sad we're not getting more. Ah, well. Not all is lost. Somehow my half-assed groundhog measures did the trick; and despite the drought, I am now bringing in more green beans and cucumbers than we can quickly consume, the lettuce and parsley are regenerating, and the cilantro only looks semi-terrible.
I did some weeding yesterday--selectively, because stirring up the soil just dries it out even more. I cut down dead flower stalks, deadheaded blooms, and ran the trimmer over the splayed edges of the brown lawn. Things out there look as good as they can look, which is not good at all but is at least no longer dotted with crabgrass.
As I worked, I pulled together some thoughts for a new class on the long poem, so check out what I've posted on the Poetry Kitchen page. I am not 100 percent sure the class will run, though I certainly hope so.   Are people interested in pushing themselves into length? I don't really know.
As I wrote yesterday, for me, the long poem has been transformative. I believe that my best work is likely embedded in those poems. I have learned so much about myself, about the expansiveness of poetry, about dramatic movement and tension, about narrative, about the unknown. Oddly, I've also had external success with those poems: several have appeared in major journals; several have received attention from well-known writers. Many people have the notion that long poems are unpublishable, but that is not the case.
Anyway, I'd love to spend time with you and Walt Whitman and your ventures into the long form. The class will take place over two weekends: one in October, the other in November. Between times, you'll be writing and sharing with other participants. Thus, I hope it will be a social opportunity as well as a writing one. I've capped the numbers at eight instead of my usual twelve so that we have ample time to share work.
The cost is $300, which a friend tells me is way too little to charge for so much time and planning. She worries that I am undervaluing myself, and I take her point. Probably I am undervaluing myself. But I also want to make these classes affordable. I know what it's like to have no money but to long for a community of writers.

Fifty-three degrees this morning, and we're forecast to g...

Fifty-three degrees this morning, and we're forecast to get a high temperature of only sixty-five. I am glad to see the last of that ridiculous heat, though the continuing lack of rain is painful. Still, it will be pleasant to work outside on a cool day, and that is my plan: weeding, deadheading, running the trimmer, and such.

Yesterday I performed my annual drawer and closet clean-out: sorting through ragged underwear and unforgivable socks, admitting defeat with the supposedly decent items I never seem to wear. This is one of the advantages/disadvantages of living in a tiny house with hardly any closets: the stuff must go. Last week I did a book cull, this week a clothes cull. Fall is on the way, and I'm clearing the decks.

Last weekend's class went well, I think. It's interesting to watch people wrestle with their imaginations--to note where they are willing to venture, where they are not. Some people get distracted by other people's imaginations: say, the metaphors and allusions embedded in literature. Some people get distracted by the intensity of their own real-life emotions or situations. So where does private invention start to create a wormhole through these distractions? What pattern or word or sound is the first opening?

I'm thinking of constructing a future generative class around the building of a long poem--maybe using Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" as the source of prompts and conversation. About once a year or so I find myself writing a very long poem . . . but why? Where does this need come from? And where does the stamina come from? These poems often turn out to be very important to me, both personally and developmentally. They are big, in more ways than one. They are also exhausting. But I've noticed that few people in my classes seem to push themselves into length. What would happen if I created a structure for that experiment?

Today is my parents' sixty-third wedding anniversary. It ...

Today is my parents' sixty-third wedding anniversary. It is also the eighth anniversary of the day T and I closed on this house. That means we've now lived in Portland for nearly nine years (including our first year in the apartment on Munjoy Hill). We're not newcomers anymore.

Eight years in this seventy-seven-year-old house, with its rattletrap repair history and wildlife invasions; with its beautiful new kitchen and charming neighbors; with its sociable front garden and its past-glorious neighborhood cats; with its little wood stove and its clothesline; with its two tiny studies housing two tiny private lives; with its bed, built of Harmony ash, and its bedroom window, with its view of the bay-mirror sky and the wheeling gulls.

Well, I can admit, finally, that I'm glad to be here. This little neighborhood, this little house; the gift of being a poet among other poets; the ability to walk out my door to a meal, a market, the bay, even a small wood; the ease of traveling to visit my children. Eight years in, these amenities still feel extravagant. It is hard to explain how far away Harmony was, and is, from such easy congress.

When we moved to Harmony, we were twenty-eight years old and our blood ran hot and we were overflowing with energy and self-will. We would do everything ourselves! We would do everything in the hardest way possible! But now I am almost sixty-one, and I am ready to welcome a little ease. We still work all the time, so our version of ease is not really all that easy. But we've got a furnace and a dishwasher and trash pickup. We're five minutes away from the grocery store and ten minutes away from the bus to New York City. We can walk to a restaurant on a whim. Poets stop by for coffee. Neighbors leave sympathy cards for our dead cat. I came here kicking and wailing. But it's a good place to have landed.

Little Chuck had his first Bad Day yesterday. He got too ...

Little Chuck had his first Bad Day yesterday. He got too excited about a fly and broke a flowerpot in the bathroom while I was teaching, then wailed outside my study door so I had to let him in and wiggle distracting peacock feathers for an hour while also trying to lead a class. Fortunately, having raised two boys, I am able to do five things at once. But I do have hopes that nap time will arrive earlier today and I will do less kitten-roping.

This morning Chuck is back to his usual post-breakfast coziness. We are sitting together on the couch, and C is purring and admiring my hair, and I am purring and admiring his hair, and one would never know we'd had words yesterday over a flowerpot. Chuck just doesn't think straight when a fly is involved.

Meanwhile, T was dealing with a pile of new acquisitions. He's been working on the same massive house build for years, but the job is finally winding down, and that means, among other things, that many over-ordered materials and unwanted items that would otherwise be headed for the dumpster are being offered to employees. So now, in addition to a massive pile of foraged lumber, a new ladder, a roll of window screen, etc., we are the bemused owners of a weird-looking coffee table that apparently cost $3,000 new. I thought I might hate it but I don't. I actually kind of like it, and it's encouraging us to think about getting a rug to go with it, and maybe another lamp, and turning the living room into a comical mod space.

So while I was teaching/Chuck-roping, T was replacing torn window screens, and cleaning the basement to make room for some of the foraged lumber, and putting junk on the curb to see if anyone would take it, and cogitating over the coffee table, and otherwise figuring out how to deal with his building-material harvest.

Now, at first light, the seagulls are screaming over something or other, and a pale breeze is creeping through the new window screens, and a kitten is coiled in my lap like a doughnut, and I am thinking about the dream I just had: I was eating lunch at a restaurant with my friend Gretchen when Taylor Swift showed up and starting hugging and kissing us like the dearest of old friends. Everyone else in the restaurant was amazed but Gretchen and I tried to stay cool, like this sort of thing always happened to us.