toadlily press

I’ve got about 5-10 pages of a critical essay to write and then I’ve pretty much wrapped up my time as a graduate student at the University of Washington. Overall, I am very happy with my experience. One of the highlights was being in the presence of accomplished poets I’ve admired for a long time. I wrote briefly about my time with Heather McHugh here and I’ve been thinking about my main mentor, Linda Bierds.

Linda, besides being one of the sweetest ladies in the world, is an exquisite poet. She started out as a fiction writer before realizing that poetry was really her medium. The traces of this path are clear to me: she envisions a project of large scope and researches the hell out of it before writing the poems. Hers are truly “books” of poetry even more so than most thematically congruent collections.

When I showed up to UW, I was hoping for a mentor—someone who would know they had something to offer me and wanted to share a little of that space under their wing. I’m here, just under two years later, to say that it hasn’t happened. I got over my initial disappointment, realizing many of the amazing faculty had other ways of showing their generosity, but I am still jealous when I read about folks like Katrina Vandenburg talking about time with her mentor, Pattiann Rogers:

For four months I visited her every other week, sitting in her living room, watching her turn the pages of my manuscript. Each time she turned a page, she looked up, and I had to justify why that poem followed the previous one and how it had earned its place in that particular section. If she was satisfied with my answers, she nodded and continued. If she turned the page sideways, I knew I was coming back in two weeks.

I may not know what Linda’s living room looks like, but I have still learned a great deal from her. Yesterday I was reminded how some of my best teachers are people I have never met—Larry Levis being the main one. His books have traveled around the world with me and have helped to inform my sense of a poem’s shape and the large ambition that can (must?) live within them.

Linda, too, was my teacher before she was my teacher—and I’ll continue to learn from her even when I don’t see her so often. I felt this so clearly yesterday as I reread her gorgeous poem “Burning the Fields” from her book, The Profile Makers. Beyond its luscious textures, precise images and subtle music, the poem closes with a wisdom fit for this conversation. The time for apprenticeship in a young poet’s life may not be like burning fields, but the good work of my true teachers has, graciously, “revealed a kind of path, and then a kind of journey.”