Assay 1: Mentors, To Ground Ourselves in History

In Annie Finch's blog entry* "Women Poets and Mentorship" there is a call to action. Lay claim to your poetic traditions. Keep the poets of the past, especially those outside of the traditional canon, alive. ". . . contemporary women poets. . . are only as strong as the foremothers and precursors and mentors we choose to claim as our own, rescue from oblivion, and to ask to reach out from the past, and bless us, and help us to begin to build, at last, a tradition."

She recommends the book Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affection, edited by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker. (It's on my purchase list.) I would also suggest: Women Writers at Work; the Paris Review Interviews, The Writer and Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg, and By Herself; Women Reclaim Poetry (among the 11 feet of biography, criticism, history of poetry, and how-to books that weren't included in the original poetry book count.)

It's my hope that the growth of M. F. A. programs and organizations for school age writers, like WriteGirl, will support our sense of being part of a chain of history. I spent my whole two years at USF on a high from contact with writers through their books and writers in the program. From being mentored, to being the mentor: WriteGirl in Los Angeles allows high school women a chance to meet with a professional writer weekly, to gather with a larger group of women and girls monthly in a genre-centered workshop, and to be published.

My mentors are among the living and the dead, women I have never met but whose works are my touchstones, and those I've worked closely with on a regular basis.

Carolyn Kizer: After an elementary school project, I continued to copy out poems I admired. As an adolescent I copied several out of Mermaids in the Basement. Some of my earliest poems were based on myths, like those in one section of this book. It was an honor to hear her read, many years later, at San Jose State University.

Norma Sullivan: Every time her office door opened it expelled a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was the 1970's and she taught Feminist Literature and Creative Writing at San Diego City College. She didn't tolerate fools and nailed me for absorbing too much research about writers and producing essays that sounded like they were written by a forty-year-old critic. She ran a literary magazine Fabulous Realities, which offered me a chance to be published and to learn editorial skills. I owe many of my educational opportunities to the state of California's post-secondary school system.

Jane Kenyon: Her poems are rooted in family and domestic detail. I too had access to those. I too could be a poet. The language is direct, the craftsmanship exquisite. There are times when her rather public struggle with disease and depression have been important to me. Her "Woman Why Are You Weeping?" swept me back to the India I too had traveled. Her translations were my first introduction to Anna Akhmatova.

Jane Hirshfield: When I interviewed with the program head at USF, I was heart-broken when I discovered that Jane Hirshfield wouldn't be teaching there. Poems, anthologies, translations, essays, I've read them all. I adopt the term "assay" from her book After.

Kim Addonizio: Kim's work was already familiar when I took a first workshop with her at Berkeley Extension. She preceded me to USF. leading the first workshop I took there. From her I absorbed the value of multiple drafts and shadowy bars.

Norma Cole, my major project advisor at USF, kept offering me mind-expanding reading. She tried to teach me to trust readers, to curb my tendency to overstate my point. She is intensely kind.

Barbara Guest: Every book is a work of fine art. Thought processes and layout are closely related. All is in motion.

Cole Swensen: From her essay "Poetry City"-- "The base structure of both the city and the poem is in the labyrinth." She affirmed for me that research can be a significant contributor to depth and complexity in a poem.

Anna Akhmatova: My fingers have worn a furrow under the lines of her "Requiem." She showed me what the responsibility of being a witness entailed.

And there are the women I have worked with in small groups: Melanie Neilson, Shelley Shipley-White, Madeline Bassinett, Jasmine Donahaye, Barbara McEnerney, Cynthia Campbell, Marti Stephen, Christina Hutchins, Alice Templeton, and Caryn Scotto D'Lucca.

Among the men who have fostered my creativity: Joseph Millar, John Fox, Aaron Shurin, John High, D. A. Powell, and David Gaynon.

*See http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/