Tuesday October 13
7pm
Dawn Potter & Jeanne Marie Beaumont
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One winter morning, poet Dawn Potter sat down at her desk in Harmony, Maine, and began copying out the opening lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Her intent was to spend half an hour with a poem she had never liked, her goal to transcribe a page or two. Maybe she would begin to appreciate the poet’s art, though she had no real expectations that the exercise would change her mind about the poem. Yet what began as a whim turned rapidly into an obsession, and soon Potter was immersed in a strange and unexpected project: she found herself copying out every single word of Milton’s immense, convoluted epic.
Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton is her memoir of that long task. Over the course of twelve chapters, Potter explores her very personal response to Milton and Paradise Lost, tracing the surprising intersections between a seventeenth-century biblical epic and the routine joys and tragedies of domestic life in contemporary rural Maine. Curious, opinionated, and eager, she engages with the canon on mutable, individual terms. Though she writes perceptively about the details and techniques of Milton’s art, always her reactions are linked to her present-tense experiences as a poet, small-time farmer, family member, and citizen of a poor and beleaguered north-country town.
A skilled and entertaining writer, Potter is also a wide-ranging and sophisticated reader. Yet her memoir is not a scholarly treatise: her enthusiasms and misgivings about both Milton and Paradise Lost ebb and flow with the days. Tracing Paradise reminds us that close engagement with another artist’s task may itself be a form of creation. Above all, Potter’s memoir celebrates one reader’s difficult yet transformative love affair with Milton’s glorious, irritating, inscrutable masterpiece.
“Potter writes beautifully. Her prose is as clear as the song of a bell bird. She knows how to use detail, quotations from Milton but also domestic detail, for this is a book about living sensibly more than about Milton. It made me ponder my life as well as literature, as a good book should do but few books do. . . . Reading this memoir was an intellectual joy. I know a little about country things, a lot about children, and some, maybe, about the way husbands and wives tumble through life. The book is the real thing.”
Samuel Pickering, author of Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do
Dawn Potter is the author of two poetry collections, most recently How the Crimes Happened. She is associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and lives in Harmony, Maine, with her husband and two sons.
Jeanne Marie Beaumont grew up in the Philadelphia area and moved to New York City in 1983. She holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Her first book, Placebo Effects, was selected by William Matthews as a winner in the National Poetry Series and published by W.W. Norton in 1997. In 2004, her second collection of poems, Curious Conduct, was published by BOA Editions, Ltd., and her third collection is forthcoming from BOA in 2010. With Claudia Carlson, she co-edited the anthology The Poets’ Grimm: Twentieth Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Story Line Press, 2003).
Her poems have been included in two dozen anthologies and textbooks, among them Good Poems for Hard Times, Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website, When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, 20th ed., The Norton Introduction to Literature, 9th ed., and Don’t Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review. Journals in which her work has appeared include Boston Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Court Green, Harper’s, Manhattan Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Poetry Northwest, Witness, and World Literature Today, among many others. She won The Greensboro Review literary award for poetry in 2003. From 1992 to 2000, she was co-editor of the literary magazine American Letters & Commentary.
Her poem “Afraid So” was made into a short film by award-winning filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt; it has been screened at numerous international film festivals since 2006. She studies bookbinding, and serves on the programming committee, at The Center for Book Arts, where she has curated readings for its Broadsides Reading Series.She has taught at Rutgers University and at The Frost Place, where she is now the director of the annual Advanced Seminar. She currently teaches at The Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.
