Dawn Potter lives and writes in rural Maine with her husband and two sons, teaches poetry, and chops her own firewood. The SR recently caught up with Dawn to discuss her work with Milton, literary influences, and the pains and triumphs of writing.
SR: Why do you choose to live where you do, the way that you do? What does it bring you?
It was cheap to live here initially. My husband and I had animals—we keep goats—and the area was financially easy at first. And we had never lived anywhere since college where everyone knows each other. It grew on us.
SR: Were you raised with a rural background?
My parents were both professors from West Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but both had been the first in their families to go to college, and they came from rural backgrounds.
SR: Did your parents get you interested in literature?
As far as reading and writing my mother was the one who got me interested. I’d be tooling around the house being bored and she’d say, “Here, read this” and she’d hand me Melville. She really introduced me to great literature that way.
SR: Speaking of great literature, you recently copied out Milton’s Paradise Lost. Where did you get the idea for this?
I invented the poem-copying method for myself, though I have since heard of other people who do it. I kept a poetry journal and wrote down things I liked in other poems. I found it helped me understand the syntax and meter, helped me know why I liked the poem and what made it good. I would sometimes use it to help when I just couldn’t write. I would write out a piece [from another poem] that meant something to me, and that would help.
SR: So Why Milton?
The Milton project was of course a completely different project and really made a big change in my life. I had always hated Milton; since school I’d just despised the poem. Now I have mixed feelings towards him. I admire what he did with what’s often referred to as “economy of language.” You know, you hear that and you think William Carlos Williams and you think “short,” but he [Milton] had a lot to say and in really tight language that was very complex.
SR: Do you have your students copy poems?
Copying out really helps students—and this is my younger students as well as older—remember that the poem is a written thing; that it didn’t just appear on the page. You start paying attention to questions like “why is there a comma here?” or “why is that word capitalized?” And they ask those questions and they get engaged and they engage each other.
SR: Tell us about your own teacher, Baron Wormser. What kind of impact has your relationship with Baron had on your writing?
I met Baron at the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. It has workshops that attract a lot of local hobby writers. I had never gone to creative writing school and I was home with two small kids, so it was a big risk for me to enter into this workshop not knowing how my work would measure up. Baron was the teacher and after class came up to me and said, “You could be a writer. Would you like to work with me?” So every week we would sit down in his kitchen with a packet of my work and he would just criticize.
SR: What were his criticisms?
My biggest crutch in poetry at the time was form. I would obscure what I was really concerned about in terms of meaning in order to fit the standards of the form and make a poem sound good. With Baron I was discovering that talent as a writer can actually get in the way of what you’re trying to do with the writing. He helped me focus on grammar and pointed out the grammatical muddles where a poem could have gone some place interesting but defeated itself.
SR: What do you still struggle with in your writing?
It feels dangerous to immerse yourself in someone else’s character. My first book, like many people’s first books, was very personal. A lot of first books deal with the things that define you—family, high school, the things that you need to get off your chest. Moving on to other characters’ plights can be saddening. You take it to heart.
SR: So is writing painful?
Well [writing] is not really fun. I honestly like revision better; once something is already on the page you can play with it. They say that writing is cathartic, but it’s really kind of sickening for me. It’s painful to push and not turn your gaze away—to look and look and look and create images for your mind’s eye. You have to stay on the edge because if you look away, you lose your edge. It’s pleasant to see afterwards, when it’s on the page, to feel like I drove myself to someplace.
SR: What was the first work of yours to be published? How long did it take you to get it published?
I had a short story and small poem published in my twenties, but this was before online guides, so I was submitting randomly at the time. I submitted to things way beyond my league. In 2004 I had my first book published. I blindly wrote a query letter to a small publisher in Maine, and without knowing me or my reputation they accepted my work. It was a small press and didn’t really sell a lot of copies, but it was good journeyman work for me. It was work I had to get out. Baron once told me “The best you can hope for out of your first book is to look back after twenty years and say, ‘at least it doesn’t suck.’”
SR: Some of your recent work has revolved around myths and fairy tales. Where do you think this trend comes from?
I’ve always been interested in myths and narrative. I read a lot of fiction, though I’m not a good fiction writer. I found Milton instructive in why narrative poetry is not prose. There’s a necessary compression of the story, when you don’t have time or space for wasted words. Myths and old stories include what they have to include. They don’t waste time with the sort of twentieth-century conventions of narrative.
SR: What’s a word that, if removed from all dictionaries, would break your heart?
I’m a big fan of “and.” I like it even more than “the.” It adds layers of complexity to the writing. When I’m revising I spend a lot of time on “and.” One thing I learned from Milton was complication through repetition. He uses “light” in so many ways—not one word or meaning, but one image offers so much. There’s a lot of that use of light and dark and play on the meanings of the image in fairy tales, too.
SR: What’s a word you wish that you could strike from your vocabulary forever?
The nervous “like.” I’m as guilty of it as anyone.
SR: Who is your favorite dead poet?
Tough. It changes a lot, but Keats and Coleridge are always toward the top.
SR: Who is your favorite living poet?
You know it’s so easy not to read contemporaries. He’s recently dead, but I’ve always liked Hayden Carruth. His writing comes from a place of pain that I recognize but with such a sense of humor. He has a wide sympathy, a kind of celebration of life that takes omnivorous pleasure in the world.
I’m also a fan of Wislawa Szymborska. I’ve been reading the Polish to English translation by Baranczak and Cavanagh. She deals with harder politics and everyday life in ways that are neither easy nor polemical. The poetry is funny and wry and serious all at once. I also like Michael Casey. In 1972 he was the Yale Younger Poets winner with Obscenities, but I even like his later book better: Mill Rats. I learned more about how to break a line from him than from anyone else.
SR: What or who has helped you the most in your writing?
I'm really the type of person who needs infusions of confidence. That first book was a huge step for me, and it made a big difference to have someone come up to me and say, "You could be a writer." My mother was also a writer, and I had seen for years how nervous she would get. Nervousness over writing runs in our family.
SR: Have your kids followed in your footsteps?
My boys are eleven and fourteen now, so they're old enough to tease me about my writing, which I think is great. But my youngest has gotten involved in writing of his own recently and he often complains that "it's hard to be funny." I like that he's coming across the same challenges every writer faces.
The Sewanee Review looks forward to the publication of Dawn Potter’s much-anticipated second collection of poetry, "How the Crimes Happened," forthcoming from CavanKerry Press.
Earlier this year the University of Massachusetts Press published Ms. Potter's memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton. In our spring 2007 issue she contributed a piece from that memoir, "Tracing Paradise: A Meditation on Milton, Chores and a Private Life," as well as contributing excerpts to recent issues of the Threepenny and the Southwest reviews. Sam Pickering said of the memoir, "Her prose is as clear as the song of a bell bird . . . .It made me ponder my life as well as literature, as a good book should do but few books do."
And even with a steady stream of published work Ms. Potter has found the time to become associate director at the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, a summer program for teachers at Robert Frost's home in Franconia, New Hampshire. As resident poet/teacher she'll be working alongside the program's director, Baron Wormser, another frequent contributor to our pages. For more news on Dawn Potter's work and publications, visit her blog.
