Interview with New Maine Poet Laureate Dawn Potter
It says something about a state when its leadership is personally invested in selecting a poet laureate. Governor Janet Mills comes from a political family of lawyers, but her mother was a schoolteacher, something she alluded to in naming Dawn Potter to be Maine’s seventh poet laureate earlier this year. Dawn’s a teacher whose parents both were teachers. For a politician trained in the law to acknowledge the importance of poetry, a politician like Mills who writes poetry herself, something other than politics must be at stake, something whose importance ranks with education in being primed to be overlooked. Poetry can naturally, easily be political or politicized (as can education), but to elevate a new laureate aligned with poetry education highlights a choice that should remind us that it is in the classroom, through the work of reading and writing poems, that the importance of poetry first makes itself known, to both the young and the not-so-young alike. Maine’s poet laureate position is not so much a prize as it is a job (although maybe somewhat a prized job, with its honors). Dawn herself acknowledges the tricky balance of literary success (prizes, books published) with the art of having to “cobble together” a living. Having seen how her parents “suffered what teachers everywhere suffer,” Potter knew what she was getting into making a life in Maine as a poet teacher, yet probably that was one of the reasons Mills picked her. It was, in a way, a political choice, showing where politics should be putting its priorities, as nothing vets a candidate more than knowing they’ve put the work in, the grassroots poetics that starts with learning from the bottom up, from childhood, that poets can, as Percy Shelley amazingly, hopefully claimed, build community be being the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” As Dawn says, “It’s exciting to witness what poems can do, generation after generation.”
First, congratulations! What an honor! How does it feel to be named Maine’s seventh Poet Laureate? I saw you recently in Freeport, onstage with Betsy Sholl, Wes McNair, Stu Kestenbaum, and Julia Bouwsma, our last four laureates. Along with remembering the voices of Kate Barnes and Baron Wormser, what’s it like being asked to join this conversation of great writers?
Well, I suppose the obvious word is humbling. Throughout my apprenticeship and in the years since, I have studied under, observed, worked alongside all of these poets. They have been models for me, both as public activists for poetry and as people who treat art as the frame of their experience on this earth. Their curiosity, their convictions, their everyday affections . . . Their lives and their work are equivalently generous, and it is bewildering good fortune to be in their company.
Something a few of the laureates noted, Stu and Julia, I think: the pressure of composing and sharing public, occasional poems. There was talk of serving as visiting chaplain, leading the state legislature in an opening “prayer.” How do you approach this traditional aspect of your laureate duties? Poets often write in response to prompts, but writing on demand, to suit a civic occasion—do you look forward to the challenge?
I’ve never written an occasional poem before, but I often write from a space of unknowing, and I hope this basic comfort with the unexpected will be some help to me. I suspect creating a framework—via form or language pattern or some other container—will also be useful. But of course I’m only guessing.
Stu nimbly finessed his chaplain service by addressing the fundamental alikeness of poetry and prayer. Something I’ve been thinking about, how both poetry and prayer are kept alive by being remembered, words that we learn by heart and take to heart. Without necessarily bringing up connections to spirituality or to mindfulness, what are your thoughts on the serious word-play of poetry?
Poetry and prayer are similar in that they expand and deepen by way of rhetoric and music: repetition, cadence, dynamics, deliberately placed silences, and so on. Both of these conversations—poetry and prayer—strive to extend one inner life into another’s, or into many others’ . . . ideally, not simply to pour out polemic or private anguish but to meet the metaphorical gaze of reader or listener or spiritual guide as they open their own souls in return. I write this as a non-religious person, but one who has always been drawn to the emotional, communal vibrations of both poetry and prayer. How this plays out in the construction of a poem is an ongoing mystery. Speaking only for my own revision practice, I think it involves some balance/imbalance between an eager disregard for “the rules” of emotional engagement (for instance, the precept to avoid words, phrases, styles, or attitudes that have become codified as sentimental or passé) and the purposeful imposition of rhetoric and music to dramatize and formalize that messy eagerness. When do formalizations take precedence over messiness? The answer varies from poem to poem. But I think the degree of friction between these impulses often becomes hugely important as I work to discover the poem hidden within a draft.
Tell me about the genealogy of your poetry. What’s its DNA, what are its traits, who do you relate to, which poets, living or dead, give your poetry its life?
I came to poetry late. I thought I would be a novelist, and from an early age I was reading voraciously—Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, Tolstoy, Woolf, Bowen, Austen, the Brontës. I still reread these and other novelists obsessively. The poetry I was most familiar with when I was young was the canonical fodder of school anthologies. I loved them, those poems by Keats, Hopkins, Shakespeare, Donne, but I didn’t know how to imagine myself in their midst, whereas I lived fully within characters such as David Copperfield and Dorothea Brooke and Lucy Snowe. So the DNA of my poems is, at one deep level, fiction. I am in large part a narrative poet: I love characters and stories and dramatic movement. But at another deep level, the DNA of my poems is music. I began playing the violin at the age of six, the same year I learned to read. I was a gifted child musician, and for a long time it seemed likely that I would go to conservatory and become a professional. But that star faded as I approached adulthood, and the music in my head became something else: it became the cadence of language. And so as I learned more about poets and poetry, I began to understand that the sounds constantly running through my thoughts were the skeletons of line and stanza. The poets I go back to most often now are those who synthesize these two urges: sound and story—Shakespeare, of course, but also those emotional storytellers, Keats and Rilke. I love Carruth’s work. I love Komunyakaa’s and Kenyon’s. I recently reread Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle and was overwhelmed by the gorgeousness of his imagery, the precision of his ear, the complexities of his characters.
The topic of this issue of The Third Fig Review is “The Quest and the Quarrel of the Poetry Prize.” You’ve just been named Maine’s new poet laureate. You’ve won literary prizes and honors in the past. How have awards and contests marked your own journey with poetry? Reflect on what it meant to your writing, to your career and identity as a poet, to win or lose a poetry competition.
To be honest, I don’t think much about prizes. I have won a few, but not nearly so many as lots of my contemporaries have. One reason is that I rarely submit to anything that costs money because I can’t afford the fees. My husband is a carpenter, and I cobble together a very part-time living through teaching and editing. There’s no stash of cash in our household that I can waste on prize submissions. I pick and choose carefully, and many years I submit nothing to any venue that requires a fee—which these days is most places. As a result, I’m currently sending out very little work to journals. My primary joy is making poems, so fretting over contests can seem beside the point, or at least a distraction from doing what I love to do. I’ve been very lucky to have published as many books as I have, but the world of contests and prizes mostly feels strange and far away, somebody else’s life.
I’m with the Millay House Rockland, so let me ask you about Edna St. Vincent Millay. Your collection Accidental Hymn opens with an epigraph by Millay. When did you first hear about her or read her poetry?
Millay’s “Recuerdo” was one of the poems that reappeared in my school anthologies. For years it was the only poem by Millay I knew, and I was attracted to it initially because the poet was a woman. Not many women poets showed up in standard high school literature texts in the 1970s. I said, in response to one of your earlier questions, that I came to poetry late insofar as my ability to fully enter into it as a shared art. But individual poems were constantly niggling at me, pushing me into new spaces. “Recuerdo” was the first poem I’d ever read that celebrated erotic attraction from a woman’s point of view. I was a teenager and besotted with romance and the longings of the body. But I’d been raised in a household where such longings were treated as dangerous. To discover a woman poet who wrote with excitement and abandon about staying up all night with a guy she really liked? For a fifteen-year-old puritan it was a revelation.
Interestingly, I’ve learned that Millay’s power over young people continues. The high schoolers I teach may or may not know more about human relations than I did at their age, but they’re just as moved and exhilarated by Millay’s synthesis of desire and language. Her poems, along with Sappho’s, seem to be particularly meaningful to kids who are navigating the dizzying joys and sorrows of adolescence. Even as she meets them where they are emotionally, her exquisite craft lofts them into a face-to-face engagement with beauty. It’s exciting to witness what poems can do, generation after generation.
I’ve been asking writers to respond to Millay’s “Renascence,” revisiting the landmark poem that launched her career at age 20. What’s your impression of it? You work with young writers. What does the poem tell you about Vincent’s emerging voice, and can it be read today for its own sake, without the burden of knowing where the poet’s life and writing will take her?
To my ear, “Renascence” embodies stanza by stanza the wildly swinging emotions of youth, so in that way I think it’s certainly an intriguing poem to introduce to young poets. I can imagine inventing a writing prompt that would ask them to enact a parallel emotional zigzag, and I think they’d respond in interesting ways. (The rhymed couplets and the archaisms might pose more of a problem in a teaching setting, only because certain students can get incredibly distracted by such elements, to the point of being unable to focus on any other aspect.) As far as what the poem tells me about Millay’s emerging voice: I think the subtleties of her best sonnets owe a huge debt to “Renascence.” With the sonnet she contained her expansiveness in ways that create great tension, and the form also enabled her to revel in form while creating more sonic complexity. I remember Terrance Hayes speaking of a sonnet’s volta as the point when the poem suddenly changes its mind. That makes sense to me as it pertains to Millay’s delight in the zigzag. It’s such a perfect frame for her.
Millay’s famous for her mastery of form, especially the sonnet. What’s your relationship with the sonnet and other poetic forms? How do you engage with formal literary tradition? Do you experiment with new forms, invent forms?
I’ve had a long relationship with the sonnet. Very early on, I adored Keats, I loved Shakespeare, and so the form took hold in me. Now and again, as a teenager, I would write a sonnet—not because I believed I was a poet but just because I had a raw urge to exist inside the form. This attraction has stayed constant. While I don’t only, or even mostly write in received forms, I am still frequently seized by the sonnet, compelled to wrestle within it once again. I think most, maybe all, of my published collections contain at least one sonnet. Some are traditional in construction, some are unrhymed or irregularly metered, but all address the sonnet as a structure for thought. Recently, for instance, I’ve been immersed in a sonnet project with two other poets, Teresa Carson and Jeanne Marie Beaumont. Taking a Millay sonnet as our trigger, we wrote a three-poet sonnet cycle in which we borrowed lines first from Millay’s “Clearly my ruined garden as it stood” and then from one another to propel us into our next drafts. (We’ve posted the results in our Substack journal, Poetry Lab Notes and also include a discussion of the process and our reactions to it.)
You ask about my engagement with literary tradition. As you’ve probably gathered by now, I am constantly returning to poets and novelists of the past. I am not in any way an academic: I have zero interest in examining literature through a scholarly lens. I just love reading and rereading these writers—sometimes wrestling or arguing with them (Milton, for instance); sometimes just falling headlong in love. So even though I’m a contemporary poet who is concerned with the world as it is now, this immersion in the past has undoubtedly affected my work—its subject matter, its prosodic experiments, its cadence and rhetorical drama. Even my free verse poems tend to be sonically and visually formal, and what I’m reading often erupts into what I’m writing in unexpected ways.
You have a collection of poems entitled Calendar. Your reader’s memoir, Tracing Paradise, is subtitled Two Years in Harmony with John Milton. In the context of your writing on craft, you’ve spoken of a “reading-conversation-writing cycle.” Say something about the place of cycles and the passage of time in your writerly/readerly life. I know you post an ongoing blog and keep a list of the books you’re reading. Give me a sense of the orbits and epicycles, the rhythms and harmonics, that chart your creative reading and writing activity.
I don’t have a graduate degree; in fact, I’ve never even taken a graduate course. Since earning my B.A. in 1986, I have cut my own trail as a reader, following my whims wherever they take me. Of course that means I have a lot of holes in my literary education. But it also means that reading has never become something I’m supposed to do. For most of my life I’ve read every day, usually for hours at a time. It’s not goal-oriented. It’s more like breathing. I can’t imagine a day in which I’m not reading something or other. So when the poems begin to come—when I enter into a cycle of making—they slip into the reading stream. They entwine.
While I don’t write poems every day, I do write a blog entry every day, and I’ve been doing so since 2008. Blogs have become an antiquated version of social media, which I find amusing. But writing a post is now a habit, so I keep going. I get up at 5 a.m., feed the cat, make coffee, bring a cup to my husband, then sit down and write whatever pours out of my fingers. It’s not a diary entry made public: I have a private life that doesn’t enter into the blog. I think of each post more as a daily letter to a familiar reader. I really have no idea how many people read these letters. I always imagine there are about eight, and this pretense of smallness helps me stay small in scope. I write about the cat, or my garden, or what I made for dinner, or what I’ve been reading, or what writing crisis I’m undergoing. But this regular reaching-out is also, in a way, analogous to playing scales on the violin. It is practice and polish, and a way to become comfortable with risk. I sit down not knowing if I have anything to say. Then I write, and words become sentences, and someone, somewhere, is waiting to read them.
As for the poems: I tend to write and revise in a flurry of activity. Drafts appear, I revise feverishly, and usually I reach a final version within a week. I know some people revise slowly over long periods of time, and certainly I do tweak finished poems much later—say, when I’m gathering them together into a manuscript or otherwise revisiting them. But the bulk of my revising takes place in intense, concentrated flashes over the course of a few days. I used to worry about this pattern, but these days I’m more accepting. We don’t all work in the same way. We write to suit our minds, bodies, and outside obligations. In my case, I got used to writing and revising in flashes when I was home with my small sons, and the pattern became ingrained. I didn’t have the luxury of slowness. At the same time, I learned that my excitement about writing thrives in such intensity, that I’m a better writer and reviser when I’m hyper-focused.
Poems reread can act like almanacs or calendars, memory-places of a kind, cycles in a way. Which poets, which poem, do you reread most?
If I were to name the one poem that has remained a constant beacon over the course of my life, I’d have to choose Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Every time I reread it, I relive the sensation I had when I first read it, when I had no idea what I was meeting or what it would tell me. The poem is about suddenly falling in love with a poem, and it enacts the sensation of suddenly falling in love with a poem, and it stuns me every single time I reread it.
Talk to me about your involvement with Monson Arts and with the Poetry Kitchen, and before that with the Frost Place in New Hampshire. How does the “teacherly” intersect with the “reading-conversation-writing cycle?” How does this public-facing work open into your coming responsibilities as poet laureate? I’m especially interested in your work with young and emerging voices, high school students, as a commitment to giving birth to and fostering the creative spirit, a commitment that aligns with the vision of Millay House Rockland as well.
My parents were both teachers, and I grew up determined not to be one. They suffered what teachers everywhere suffer: they were overwhelmed by grading; they had to teach subjects they didn’t love; students cared more about grades than about learning; administrators weren’t supportive. Nothing about that world attracted me.
But after I started apprenticing with the poet Baron Wormser, I learned there were other ways of being a teacher: that one could teach from the heart of one’s own delight. Baron began as my mentor, but before long he began bringing me along on his school visits. I started doing some poet-in-the-schools work on my own, then took a job as music teacher at my sons’ elementary school in Harmony, Maine. So gradually, as I gained skills as a poet, I also gained skills as a teacher: the two went hand in hand.
Baron was the founder and director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire. One year he brought me in as guest faculty. The following year he offered me a regular gig as associate director, and when he retired, he recommended me as his successor. I was incredibly lucky to have that opportunity because on paper I was completely unqualified: no MFA, no education degree, nothing but what I’d learned on the job. I will forever be grateful to Baron and to the Frost Place board and staff for having confidence in me.
I’m currently leading two different programs at Monson Arts here in Maine. One is the Conference on Poetry and Learning, a meandering descendant of the program that Baron founded at the Frost Place. It’s a week-long conference for teachers, teaching artists, poets, and activists that focuses on creating poems, integrating poetry with other disciplines, and incorporating that learning into our teaching, our writing practice, and our communities. However, the program has morphed into a somewhat different shape since Baron’s time. Notably, because Monson Arts is a center for many different artistic disciplines, I’ve been able to bring poetry into conversation with other arts and artists, which has been a challenging and exciting shift and has forced me to rethink many of my own strategies and assumptions—particularly about traditional approaches to workshopping and revision.
I also direct Monson Arts’ high school studio writing program, which draws students from several central Maine schools. Every year I work with a cohort of these young rural writers, meeting with them for a full school day, every other week, from September till May. It’s a dream job, really: no tests, no assessment, no discipline issues—just a class full of eager writers who are longing to discover themselves and the world via the word.
Finally, on my own, I lead classes through what I call the Poetry Kitchen: Zoom-based sessions on topics that interest me. Most recently, I’ve offered a two-day generative class titled “Syntax as Spark: Poets Learning from Prose.” I keep these classes as inexpensive as possible so that people from many walks of life can afford to take them. And I also welcome poets at any stage of development, from beginner to professional. We can all learn from one another.
None of these teaching jobs is anything like what I thought teaching would be when I watched my parents slog through their days. The work is just as creative, just as absorbing, as writing my own poems. And the pleasure of building community is a joy all its own.
Here’s a question I also asked Julia. You’re Maine poet laureate. Millay moved from Maine. A lot of young Mainers feel they need to leave the state to find their way. If you were writing a letter to a young Maine poet today, a version of yourself or a Vincent Gen Z, what insights would you share about the places we write from and the place of Maine in the poetry world?
I’m the mother of two young-adult sons. Both were born in central Maine, went to local rural schools, fell in love with theater and filmmaking, and left the state to study those arts. Both have found steady work in their fields, but neither has been able to figure out how to come back to Maine, though they love it dearly and think of it as their home. The story of leaving is a familiar and sorrowful one. Yet those of us who did the opposite—who came from away when we were young—often had to make different sorts of sacrifices, embracing isolation, even penury, in order to carve out a place for ourselves in this lonesome landscape. I’m not sure what I’d say to a young person who is on this cusp. Both choices are painful; both offer unexpected glories. Maybe I’d say Admit your fears. Admit your longings. Embrace surprise. Don’t let shame do the talking.
Let’s keep talking about place. Why Maine? In the late 1950s, the state published a booklet promoting Maine: Poets’ Corner of America. The publication is what you might expect, Longfellow, E. A. Robinson, Millay, a map of literary landmarks. Your time in Augusta will continue this tradition. Is there something about Maine that produces or attracts poetry? Is it just myopic provincialism (and boosterism), or does Maine actually have a corner on the creative community, some legacy of the New England Renaissance, or some favorable situation on the New York artworld coterie circuit? And what do you make of Rockland poet Leo Connellan’s complaint that “Maine cannot provide for its bright youth.”
I’m probably not the best person to answer these questions because I don’t have my finger on the poetry-biz pulse. My sense, though, is that there are two overlapping orbits in the United States: the poets who primarily teach and network within the academy, and the poets who largely work outside universities and MFA programs. It seems to me that most poets today probably don’t work in the place where they were born, so state boundaries may or may not play a part in their self-definition. Still, though I did not arrive in Maine till I was in my late twenties, I think of the state as both my home and my homeland—birthplace of so many parts of myself . . . as poet, partner, parent, steward, friend. I daresay many other poets and artists feel the same about whatever landing place has become their homeland. Which brings me to your citing of Connellan’s complaint: “Maine cannot provide for its bright youth.” I think the issue is larger than Maine. The world cannot provide for its bright youth. And so they fade, or they make do with second best, or they corrupt themselves, or they light out for the territories, or they build a cottage in the wild wood. It’s an old story, one that extends beyond our time and state and nation, back into the realms of myth and fairy tale.
It’s probably too soon to ask about what specific projects you’re envisioning as you advocate for poetry in Augusta but share something about where your laureateship might go. What places? What are the waypoints you’re looking towards as you chart the term of your laureateship?
I have a few thoughts about the years ahead, though of course they are still amorphous. Much depends on the vagaries of funding, and I can’t give up my day jobs, so the projects will need to fit in around my work schedule. But essentially, they fall into two camps. The first would focus on encouraging the growth of community writing groups: regular gatherings of local poets who meet to generate new work and build camaraderie. The second would focus on teachers and students: extending the poetry programs I’ve built at the Frost Place and Monson Arts into other areas of the state.
