The Importance of Having More Than One Mentor or Role Model

As a writer, it’s extremely helpful for you to have a mentor, someone who provides you with guidance, encouragement, inspiration, and networking connections. The support of a mentor often makes the difference between a talented individual who merely dabbles in writing at a certain point, and someone who sustains a literary career over a lifetime.

Similarly, it’s important for you as a writer to have role models, authors whose work serves as a goal to aim for. The poet Charles Baudelaire called this kind of artistic role model “a beacon shining from a thousand citadels” in his poem “The Beacons.” 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

It’s good to have a hero or heroine who shows you at the start of your journey that the literary project and life you desire is possible, within reach.

Mentors and role models are often people with powerful personalities who seem almost larger than life. They can be charismatic, bold, risk-taking. That’s what makes them appealing as mentors and role models. That’s exactly why we want to emulate them.

But a mentor or role model who looms too large in your consciousness can also be a detriment. It’s tempting to want to imitate that role model, to want be that person. And often mentors of that type need to fuel their egos with disciples who follow their every precept. Behind a mentor’s big ego is often a fragile self, requiring adulation.

The danger of your having just one role model or mentor is that you can become only an imitator. Often mentors make exciting innovations, so it seems that by following that person, you can also be an innovator. But shadows of new styles are not new.

The poet John Ashbery accomplished an extraordinary sweep of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 for his book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery’s collection sounded extremely daring at the time. He used a radical collage technique that pieced together reflection, wit, observation, pop culture, and traditional art. Given the enormous success at the time of Ashbery’s poetic style, an entire crop of Ashbery disciples began to publish work that utilized his techniques. Those imitators enjoyed a brief celebrity in the reflected light of Ashbery’s reputation, but their names are mostly forgotten today. 

Rather than become a devoted follower of a particular author, you have to discover your own literary project. Apprenticing yourself to a mentor can be a highly important step in that process because it provides the validation of that admired author’s support, and often entrée into a literary community. But the more influences you’re open to, the more you can pick and choose which of those influences are helpful in finding a literary project that is yours alone, and that only you can accomplish. That takes time, and it also takes courage to step out from behind a mentor and make your own mark.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Choosing Poems for a Reading

The poems you choose for a reading can make an enormous difference in how an audience receives and appreciates your work. The order that you select for your poems can be equally important.

You may want to focus your choices on a recent book, in order to promote sales. If you include poems from too many different projects, the audience may not focus enough on any one series of poems to want to read more.

The poem you start a reading with should be one of your best, or at least one of the works you feel particularly excited about in the collection or group of poems you’re featuring.

The first poem sets the tone for your reading. It shows the audience that you’re going to deliver a satisfying experience, and that they should pay close attention. The first poem forms a bond between the poet and the audience—if it’s the right poem. The wrong poem can have the opposite effect—it can put the listeners on guard that this reading might demand things emotionally that they are not prepared to give.

What do I mean by “the right poem” or “the wrong poem” to start a reading with? Well, a poem that puts the audience members on the defensive or that puts an idea in their mind that the poet is not psychologically stable is not a good choice. For instance, a first poem that relates an episode of kinky sex, or violence, or terrible tragedy, is a questionable way to start a reading.  I’m not suggesting that you take those poems off your list. Not at all. But the audience wants to know first of all that the poet is in control of his/her life and that the audience is not there to take care of the poet’s life traumas.

A poem that is dense and requires multiple readings to understand or appreciate is also not a great choice for the first poem of a reading. Long poems are also not the best.

On the other hand, the first poem, and all the poems in a reading, should challenge the audience. The people who have made the effort to come out and hear you want to be surprised, moved, and provoked to think and feel. That balance between tossing a thunderbolt at the audience, and making them feel comfortable, is not an easy one, but it’s critical to a good reading.

One way to set an audience at ease from the beginning of a reading is to use humor. Audiences love the release of laughter. It allows them to relax.

One of the most effective arcs for a poetry reading is to begin with humor, and to grow more serious as the reading progresses. This allows the audience to get comfortable with you and to trust you, and then to challenge them with more highly charged work as the reading goes deeper.

The transition from humor to seriousness is a delicate one. Sometimes humor can lighten up a serious mood that you create with a poem about a highly emotional topic. But reading too raucous a poem after one that deals with tragedy may trivialize and conflict with the mood you’ve created, and it can distance the audience. In my opinion, it’s better to start funny, and then move toward deeper topics, with a transitional poem to make the bridge.

Of course, some poets focus primarily on humor in their work, and some deal with such serious subjects that humor isn’t part of their repertoire. All that is fine. I’d only suggest starting and ending with two of the most impactful poems, to create a shape to the reading.

One final rule of thumb: don’t cry at your own reading. It’s good to read emotional poetry, and for the audience to see that you have a lot at stake emotionally in your own writing, through your voice and expression. But if you actually cry, you’re going to weaken the bond between you and your audience, because they’re going to start worrying if they have to take care of you, rather than appreciating your writing. In a sense, the poet is taking care of the audience’s edification and emotions for the duration of her/his reading, so it makes the audience uncomfortable when the shoe is forced onto the other foot. 

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Michael Field: The Work and Lives of a Victorian Poet

The poet Michael Field was not actually a man. Or a woman. Michael Field was the pen name of two women who lived in Victorian England, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913). The story is even more complicated than that. Katharine Bradley was Edith Cooper’s aunt, and they were lovers who lived together as a couple. The two were accomplished authors who collaborated to write eight books of poems and numerous verse dramas.

Michael Field: Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, like many women writers of their time, published under a man’s name as a way to be taken seriously. In fact, once the secret got out that they were really a female writing duo, their work was reviewed less earnestly by critics, as the novelist and critic Emma Donoghue documents in her engaging and beautifully written biography, We Are Michael Field.

In their time, “the Michael Fields,” as they were called by their circle, were befriended and accepted by many of the leading writers of the day, including Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, and Havelock Ellis. They were true eccentrics who actually wrote a book of love poems to their deceased lap dog. Their work fell out of fashion toward the end of their lives and has only recently received new attention. I’m extremely grateful to Professor Pearl Chaozon Bauer of Notre Dame de Namur University, who acquainted me with their writings and is part of a new wave of scholars reviving the work of Michael Field.

The work of Katharine Bradly and Edith Cooper declined in renown partly because of sexism and homophobia. Their poetry also dropped out of favor because the Michael Fields accepted many of the conventions of Victorian style. They preferred “thou” to “you,” “doth” to “does,” and used poetic interjections such as “O!” The pair often wrote in rhyme, meter, and form. Since their careers ended right at the same time that modernism was purging poetry of the cliché language of the nineteenth century, the poetry of the Michael Fields was lost in the tidal wave of new writing that discarded more traditional diction.

Then why is it important to give the work of the Michael Fields another look? Because their poetry still feels contemporary and exciting in many ways. They were clear-sighted writers who saw with a fresh and free-thinking perspective. Here is a poem of theirs I particularly like:

Nests in Elms

The rooks are cawing up and down the trees!

Among their nests they caw. O sound I treasure,

Ripe as old music is, the summer's measure,

Sleep at her gossip, sylvan mysteries,

With prate and clamour to give zest of these—

In rune I trace the ancient law of pleasure,

Of love, of all the busy-ness of leisure,

With dream on dream of never-thwarted ease.

O homely birds, whose cry is harbinger

Of nothing sad, who know not anything

Of sea-birds’ loneliness, of Procne’s strife,

Rock round me when I die! So sweet it were

To die by open doors, with you on wing

Humming the deep security of life.

It’s so unexpected that cawing crows become for the speaker of this poem a reassuring presence, affirming the calm persistence of life. I often think of crows as annoying, noisy, dirty birds, but Michael Field surprisingly sees their vitality and tenaciousness. The crows stimulate the poets to write in runes of “the ancient law of pleasure,/of love”—a pagan and joyous celebration of the carnal side of life. Not what I think of as Victorian poetry, at all! Even within the confines of this Petrarchan sonnet, Michael Field manages to include thrilling language: “Rock round me when I die!”

Sadly, both Katharine and Edith succumbed to the family illness of cancer, Katharine dying at 67, and her niece Edith at 51, predeceasing her aunt by ten months.

If you don’t know the writing of Michael Field, take the time to seek out their work. They’ll surprise you with the sensuality and depth of their poems.

  

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 4—Jack Kerouac’s Haiku; and Conclusion

The last poet I’m going to talk about is Jack Kerouac, who lived from 1922 to 1969. Kerouac is better known as a fiction writer, and he was the scribe of the Beat Generation. The Beats were a group of writers and artists who burst on the American scene in the city where I live, San Francisco, in 1955.

Beat Generation writers: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs 

They were rebels who rejected the materialism of the post-World War II era in the West, and favored dropping out of society to experience authentic life through road trips, jazz clubs, altered consciousness, and amorous adventures. The most famous text of the Beat Generation is Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, an account of a car trip through the United States and Mexico.

Manuscript of Jack Kerouac's On the Road

 Kerouac typed this book on a continuous scroll of paper, unedited. On the surface, this novel is extremely American, but like much in Kerouac’s work, it has East Asian roots.

East Asian literature came to the Beat Generation through a complicated family tree. It’s a lineage that can also be traced back to Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de jade, which was known to the U.S. poet Ezra Pound. Pound created his own anthology of East Asian poetry, which he called Cathay and published in 1915. Cathay was an enormously influential book in the United States, and it profoundly affected the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, who was the literary mentor of the Beat Generation writers. 

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982)

Rexroth created his own anthologies of East Asian writing, which were very popular: One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, published in 1955, followed the next year by One Hundred Poems from the Chinese; and for good measure, 100 More Poems from the Japanese in 1976, not to mention Orchid Boat: Women Poets of China and The Burning Heart: Women Poets of Japan.

Rexroth’s interest in East Asian poetry also dovetailed with that of Beat Generation writer Gary Snyder, immortalized in The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac’s roman à clef. Gary Snyder not only read Chinese and Japanese, he lived in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and translated the Cold Mountain Poems of T’ang Dynasty poet Han Shan.

For the Beat Generation writers, it seems to me the quality that they were seeking in East Asian literature was spontaneity. Spontaneous action was something that the materialist culture of shopping mall, yes-man America did not favor. The Beat Generation writers admired that belief in inspiration in the moment in East Asian writing, and the related Buddhist practice of remaining conscious of the present, another alternative to 1950s consumerism.

Jack Kerouac’s persona in The Dharma Bums begins writing haiku under the inspiration of the character based on Gary Snyder. Kerouac was also reading the four-volume translation of haiku by R.H. Blythe, simply titled Haiku.

Jack Kerouac's notebook

According to Regina Weinreich in her introduction to Kerouac’s Book of Haikus, Kerouac scribbled haiku in “small bound notebooks—the kind he would press into his checkered lumberman’s shirt pocket and carry around anywhere for fresh and spontaneous entries.” Weinreich also mentions that Kerouac began writing haiku as a kind of literary sketchbook that he carried with him as he wandered the streets of New York and San Francisco and the highways of the United States.

The spontaneity of haiku seemed to Kerouac a perfect match for the improvisations of jazz.

Al Cohn, Jack Kerouac, Zoot Sims

Kerouac recorded a wonderful album of Blues & Haikus with the celebrated jazz saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn in 1959. You can hear this album on YouTube. Here are a couple of my favorite Kerouac haiku:

Crossing the football field,

     coming home from work

The lonely businessman

In my medicine cabinet

     the winter fly

Has died of old age

            Wash hung out

     by moonlight

—Friday night in May

Empty baseball field

     —A robin,

Hops along the bench

(haiku copyright © by Jack Kerouac)

What strikes me in listening to all of the haiku that Kerouac recorded on this album—just a fraction of the 1000 haiku he penned in his lifetime—is that these poems do not resemble the Kerouac we tend to think of. The Kerouac of the popular imagination, the Kerouac of On the Road, is an ecstatic adventurer. The haiku of his that I found the most emotionally authentic were the ones that recorded moments of quiet pathos. Maybe my own bias is showing here, but it’s interesting that this East Asian form gave Kerouac permission to show a side of himself that doesn’t emerge much in the pumped-up adventures of his novels.

I’ve chosen these three representative poets from three different regions of the West, who were part of different literary schools, and wrote during different time periods. All three of them were deeply influenced by the writing of East Asia. I call these three writers representative because they are just the tip of the wedge. I could have focused on any number of other poets, from many other countries and literary circles. Countless Western poets have borrowed from the literature of China, Japan, and Korea. By discussing these three writers, I’ve tried to show what an enormous debt the poets of the West owe to the writers of East Asia, and what an essential role East Asian poetry played in the development of literary modernism.

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 1, Introduction

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 2, The Akhmatova Bridge

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 3—Less Is More and the Poetry of Jean Follain

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 3—Less Is More and the Poetry of Jean Follain

Western artists and writers have pulled from the tradition of East Asia for another reason: brevity, conciseness, and simplicity.

Mies van der Rohe architecture: “Less is more.”

From the sketches of Pablo Picasso, to the four-word stanzas of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” to the “Less is more” steel and glass geometry of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, this aspect of the aesthetic of East Asia has opened up new possibilities in the art of the West. Traditionally, ornateness and opulence were more or less synonymous with artistry in Europe.

Medieval ivory carving, Louvre Museum

Think of the highly populated worlds of medieval ivory carvings, and the intricacies of such forms as the sestina, not to mention Tolstoy’s novels, requiring an index of the myriad of characters.

Enter the purity of East Asian art, influenced by the sensibility of Buddhism, particularly Zen.

Moon jar, South Korea

In poetry, this aesthetic is most pronounced in such forms as the tanka or waka, which creates the fulcrum of a story in only thirty-one syllables. And of course there’s haiku, which gives the readers a moment of heightened awareness in only seventeen syllables.

Even though the initial translations of East Asian poetry into European languages were in French, the aesthetic of East Asian poetry was slower to influence Paris modernism. In France, the new writing of the early twentieth century was closely linked to the subconscious, and the subconscious requires free association. Free association often takes the form of long lines or prose poems that allow for an outpouring of imagery, as in the writing of Guillaume Apollinaire or André Breton. The extended lines of Walt Whitman were more of an influence for the French modernists than the poets of East Asia.

To my mind, the French modernist who shows the greatest influence of East Asian writing is the poet Jean Follain, who lived from 1903 to 1971.

Jean Follain, French poet (1903–1971)

Follain, unlike many of his contemporaries, was not a follower of “isms.” In fact, in contrast to many of the revolutionary French writers of his time, he worked as a lawyer and then as a district judge. Many of the artists of his era flocked to the artistic center of Paris, where the cafes were continually churning out new literary movements. The great urban centers can sometimes be surprisingly provincial in their insistence on embracing the latest avant-garde. But Follain lived much of his life in the provinces, in the little town of Canisy in Normandy, in the north of France.

Canisy, Normandy, France

He was somewhat isolated from other French writers. This may be one of the reasons that he was open to influences outside Europe, particularly East Asian writing.

For Follain, the short line and the poem of few words becomes a way of sketching the fates of living beings, much the same way that a haiku or tanka poem can.

Here, for example, is Follain’s poem “Dog with Schoolboys”:

Dog with Schoolboys

For fun the schoolboys crack the ice

along a path

next to the railroad

they are heavily clothed

in dark old woolens

belted with beat leather

The dog that follows them

no longer has a bowl to eat from

he is old

for he is their age.

(translation copyright © by Keith Waldrop)

This poem is almost a Zen koan. It presents the odd spectacle of schoolboys wandering by themselves, ostensibly having fun, but there is way too much silence and emptiness in this poem for their amusement to be anything but a way to heighten the pathos. Something about the schoolboys “dark old woolens” and “beat leather” suggests anything but a carefree childhood, and may even imply domestic violence.

Follain holds off on introducing the dog until the last four lines. Unlike the boys, the dog is homeless. The last two lines are understated but shot through with emotion: “he is old/for he is their age.” The paradox is that for a dog, the age of twelve or thirteen is past middle age, while the boys are the same age but still young. And yet…we sense that there is something old about these boys, repeating the ageless pranks that schoolboys have always played, in worn-out clothing, like the garb of old men. They are next to a railroad track, but ironically, they are not going anywhere. Their lives, like that of the homeless dog, are laid out before them, and those fates seem anything but promising. “Dog with Schoolboys” is a poem that shifts rapidly in perspective, and opens a sort of bottomless, emotional trapdoor at the end. It reminds me of the very famous Japanese haiku by Ransetsu:

Hattori Ransetsu, Japanese poet (1654–1707)

The childless woman,

How tender she is

To the dolls!

(translated by R.H. Blythe)

In Ransetsu’s haiku, he also sets the scene, and then suddenly pulls the rug out from under the reader, leaving only pathos. Ironically, the non-human world evokes human loneliness.

Follain’s “Dog with Schoolboys” also reminds me of those great tanka poems where there are two separate sections, connected only metaphorically. I’m thinking, for example, of this classic by the 10^th century poet Fujiwara no Toshiyuki:

Fujiwara no Toshiyuki, tenth century C.E. Japanese poet

In the Bay of Sumi

waves crowd the shore

Even at night

by the corridors of dreams

I come to you secretly

(adapted from the translation of Kenneth Rexroth)

The poet allows the reader to make the connection between the waves crowding the shore and the speaker, who is visiting his beloved in a dream. It is only on reflection that we realize that the waves could be a metaphor for the speaker in the dream. That wonderful phrase “crowd the shore” tells us that a love that penetrates even to dreams is a bit overbearing.

Follain draws on this sort of metaphorical tanka in his poetry, often presenting two or three or more elements in his poems that seem unrelated. It’s up to the reader to place these elements in a continuum along an axis, and to figure out what that axis is. Follain borrowed from East Asian poetry to create a poetics where the reader has to solve the puzzle.

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 1, Introduction
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 2, The Akhmatova Bridge
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 4: Jack Kerouac's Haiku; and Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry