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'Tracing Paradise' Local author wins literary award for examination of Milton poem

BY HOLLY ZADRACorrespondent

HARMONY -- Not many people can relate to John Milton's 17th-century epic poem "Paradise Lost," about Adam and Eve's disobedience and fall from grace.

Even fewer can relate Milton's 10,000 lines of verse to the struggle of contemporary life in a rural Maine town.

But that is exactly what a 17-year resident of Harmony, Dawn Potter, did in her book "Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton."

Potter's book merges the masterwork with the routine and wondrous difficulty of making a marriage work, sensible living, parenthood and making do.

"It was a poem I never liked, but one I knew was great, and I wanted to know why," Potter said as she explained how she imposed this literary project upon herself.

The project began when Potter decided to "copy the whole thing out" as a way of "getting my head into somebody else's work."

For Potter, typing each line word for word helped her identify with Milton "because you have to end up writing every bit of punctuation, every strange capital letter, every strange thing."

Unlike most writers who might take on such a project, Dawn Potter does not hold postgraduate degrees, and she is not an academic surrounded by other academics.

She is a homemaker with a healthy irreverence for academia, a published poet and this year's winner of the 2010 Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction for "Tracing Paradise."

Potter said she thought she'd just start with a couple of pages of the Biblical story. Then she found herself not stopping.

And though Potter said at times it was boring, she kept up the transcription for two years as a part of her daily chores, sometimes just one or two pages a day amidst life as a wife and mother, feeding "the chickens, the goat, and the dogs, doing laundry, and making four loaves of bread two times a week."

Potter admits that before the project she had little connection to the poem, and that she had a lot of preconceived notions about "Milton and his treatment of women, the position of Eve, and his archaic, pompous language."

But as she worked, she said she found herself becoming attached to Milton like a grandchild is attached to a cranky grandparent. That attachment grew into inspiration for writing about her own life in rural Harmony as she dove into the depths of the poem.

With deep reflection on the parallels between Milton's version of the fall from grace and such subjects as daily chores, gardening, and the debate about clear-cutting, Potter wrote, "Outside my house today, the cold air vibrates with a low, steady machine drone, punctuated with the occasional crashes of steel and the rising whine of engines under stress."

She smells "a familiar, pervading smell. It's not diesel, as one might have predicted from the noise. It's the aroma of hundreds of crushed fir, pine, and spruce trees: sharp, sugary, insidious as camphor or peppermint, riddling the breeze with a lifetime's supply of joyous Christmas spirit.

"Such complications -- Do I love this? Do I hate this? -- are rife in the nature versus machine debacle."

Milton's poem itself zeroes in on such debates. "What Milton gets at are the complexities of who you blame what on," she said. In turn, Potter muses on similar debates of right versus wrong in her book.

She wrote, "Shall I revile the Morrisons, owners of the bulldozers and skidders and pulp trucks that chew up the forest floor, crush rabbit dens and poison vernal pools, rewrite the skyline and erase acres of lanky, aging pines in the space of an afternoon? These same Morrisons are a family of sweet, shy men who've rescued me from more than one automotive pickle; whose garage smells charmingly of old coffee and spilled bar-and-chain oil -- a slow-time place where I've often passed an hour perched on a cracked stool waiting for young Kyle or Ross to patch a tire or replace an alternator as various loggers on mysterious business wander through in their coveralls and discover, to their respectful embarrassment, that a woman is sitting at the parts counter... and she's reading."

Potter said her sympathy arose for Milton despite the poem not being personal. Potter said she discovered "just a human: a person who had lost a wife, a person who had lost children, a person who had a really hard time keeping his marriage together." Those little hints at his humanness kept her interested and inspired her own stories to emerge, stories that eventually became her book.

"I found out a lot about my own marriage and a lot about my own sense of what it means to be married."

Potter said she could also relate to Milton's vision of the relationship between "God and the messiah as the father-son relationship," and that the poem is rife with references to wild versus tamed land, good versus evil and blame.

Her book dives into the heart of life in Harmony, family dynamics, raising children, splitting wood and "all the things we do to live in the country that are so scrubby and unromantic."

"Harmony has been my muse. It forced me to just focus," she said.

Potter also is author of the recently released collection of poetry "How the Crimes Happened" as well as the 2004 book of poetry "Boy Land and Other Poems," in which she creates images of other characters experiencing her own experiences.

Previously, Potter spent seven years as a music teacher at Harmony Elementary and now makes a living writing, editing and teaching.

As the associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, Potter recently spent a week at Robert Frost's Homestead in Franconia, N.H. sharing techniques for teaching poetry as a living art, instead of the archaic and inaccessible genre so many people believe it is.