A01=Dawn Potter
art shaped by seasonal rhythms
artistry in daily routines
Author_Dawn Potter
blending memoir and criticism
Category=DNC
Category=DSB
contemplative process of copying
craft lessons from master poets
creative discipline rituals
creative encounters with classic texts
creative endurance
devotional reading practice
disciplined attention as inspiration
discovery through repetition
domestic contemplative life
emotional negotiations with challenging art
emotional resonance of grand narratives
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
everyday life informing literary response
evolving relationship with a major author
frustrations and revelations in reading
grappling with monumental verse
handwritten transcription projects
immersive close reading
intersections of literature and homesteading
intimate engagement with difficult texts
literary pilgrimage
meditations on artistic lineage
meditative engagement wi
northern New England creativity
personal reactions to historic poetry
personal reinterpretation of canonical works
poet's inner dialogue
poetic sensibility shaped by environment
reflections on faith and storytelling
reimagining classic verse from a modern vantage
rereading foundational works
reshaping the literary canon
rural intellectual life
rural writer's reflections
seventeenth-century epic tradition
slow reading methodology
solitude and creative persistence
text-driven self-exploration
transforming resistance into insight
working through ambivalence toward classics
wrestling with epic complexity
writer's growth through immersion
writer's life in small communities
Product details
- ISBN 9781558497016
- Weight: 218g
- Dimensions: 137 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 11 May 2009
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This is the story of a writer's intense engagement with a masterwork of Western literature. 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.
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.
