Women Poets & Mentorship

Here's a photo lifted from the Facebook website of Dickinson scholar Martha Nell Smith:

I propose that what those of us who think about poetry will find most deeply startling about this piece of photoshopping, inspired by the "Aretha's hat" post-inauguration website, is neither its humor (everyone knows Dickinson had a great sense of humor), nor the chronological workout it puts us through, nor even the implications about Dickinson's political views. What is most profoundly startling, most unprecedented, is that the photo situates Dickinson blatantly in relation to another woman's ideas. And this is not how we normally think of Dickinson.

Dickinson, after all, famously claimed that "she never had a mother." This remark, with its combination of defiance and wistfulness, surely applies to the literary and intellectual as well as to the familial realm. Dickinson passionately admired Barrett Browning and hung her picture on her wall—but this fact is not part of the Dickinson myth, nor does it affect the way in which her poems are usually read. To think of the Emily of this portrait as not only digging on Aretha, but publicly sporting her affiliation with the older woman, does violence to the usual idea of Dickinson as the perpetual daughter, the rootless wonder, the eternal anomaly, sprung Athena-like from the brow of patriarchal culture.
I have written elsewhere online and in print about Dickinson's relation to the long-forgotten "poetesses" who were the literary source of much that seems to us odd and singular about her. As Dickinson's letters attest, these are the poets that she, now considered without question one of our greatest poets, most often read, learned from, and rated herself against. Wouldn't you expect that the work of these, her influences, would be combed over, studied, valued, if only for its influence on her? And yet it is, in general, not even physically available to us (in dusty, gold-carved volumes sold for their bindings) —and if we do encounter bits of it, they are not poems written in a tradition we have any idea how to approach, to read, but only caricatures set up in contradistinction to her.
Landmark critics (Sandra) Gilbert and (Susan) Gubar sum up perfectly, in their essay "Forward Into the Past:The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, " the process by which, century after century, women poets have slid back into obscurity by eroding the ground under their feet: earlier women poets, often the first to inspire them, whom they then disavow in shame. Thus, Sexton and Plath confess to each other, but only in private, their shared, guilty early love for Sara Teasdale; thus, even the most determinedly feminist Dickinson scholars today routinely take great pains to draw a sharp and uncrossable line between the "good" Dickinson and those "bad" other nineteenth-century women poets, as if she might be contaminated by them.
Once we start asking questions about traditions involving women poets, they quickly lead to other questions, because no one has asked these questions for so long—if ever. Moore and Bishop, for example. We know Moore mentored Bishop, famously so, because it is pretty much the only story of female-to-female poetic mentorship that is available to contemporary poets. But who mentored Moore? Who showed her how it was done? My hunch is that mentoring is an art passed on through mentoringenerations, which would be, it seems to me, the real reason that women keep slipping backwards; it's hard to gain traction to mentor someone else when you were never mentored yourself. And as a poet mentored by my own biological mother, I have a guess that in Moore's case, the exception may have had something to do with Moore's lifelong poetic relationship with her mother.

"Marianne Moore and Her Mother," by Marguerite Zorach (1925)
But what happened to the chain after that? Did Bishop ever mentor another woman poet? Or did that rare mentoring chain die out with her? And what about all the women poets who don't appear to have had any mentors at all? Did they mentor themselves? Did they find male mentors, or mentors who were not poets? Are there perceptible patterns of differences between the work of the mentored and non-mentored women poets?
It is in the context of all these mutlplying questions that the title of the recent anthology WOMEN POETS ON MENTORSHIP: EFFORTS AND AFFECTIONS, edited by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker, might seem barely to emerge out of the realm of oxymoron. And that freshness which is almost strangeness is what makes this book so very valuable, so juicy, such food for the hungry. I couldn't put it down.
Here are essays by a group of women poets, born since 1960, about female poetic mentors. All the stories are fascinating for their sense of living, multilayered, complex poetic history. These are exactly the kinds of stories about interactions between actual women poets that have been so extraordinarily rare that one didn't even realize how much one had missed them. (By the way, I would imagine that male poetry readers will find this book just as important as female poetry readers will, and for similar reasons. We have all been deprived).

The typical essay here recounts a chronologically organized tale of personal and aesthetic interaction, beginning with how the mentor and mentee met and tracing a relationship sometimes intimate (Cin Salach and Maureen Seaton becoming lovers) and sometimes not (Susan Howe not replying to Jennifer's Moxley's second letter). Some of the most compelling essays are those that exercise the most editorial control over the shape of the tale, whether Aimee Nezhukumatathil's sweet and entirely personal recounting of her infatuation with Naomi Shihab Nye, or, on the impersonal side, Joy Katz' fine essay on the poetics of Sharon Olds.
WOMEN POETS ON MENTORSHIP made me think about many many mentors I've had, including two in particular I would have loved to see here: Sonia Sanchez and Carolyn Kizer (who has pretty much lost her memory as I write, although I hear that she is still enjoying letters and visits, especially from poets). Another poet it would have been fun to see included, if we were going to go dead (I don't think any contributor to this book was told they couldn't, though nobody did) would be Helen Adam (whose poems have, hurray!!, just been released in A HELEN ADAM READER edited by Kristin Prevallet, about which I hope to blog again later). Once you realize what a vacuum there is as far as discussion of these issues, an awful lot can begin to rush in to fill it. The editors of WOMEN POETS ON MENTORSHIP say that they hope this book will inspire many other volumes exploring related issues. Although this wish is such a commonplace of anthology prefaces, in the case of this book, it is easy to imagine that it will happen.

It is no coincidence that until recently most women poets have gone unmentored by living women poets, and have simultaneously turned their backs on precursor women poets, not reading or discussing them (I started the Wom-Po (Discussion of Women's Poetry) listserv many years ago in an effort to help alleviate both situations). The processes of being mentored and of helping build a tradition we can be part of are akin. Both involve realizing that when we write poetry, we are part of an ongoing effort much larger than our own project. Both can provide a sense of joy and strength, and simultaneously a sense of weakness and vulnerability. Both involve accepting help, and also helping. And both are well worth doing—arguably, urgently worth doing.
A few years back I came across an insightful and sobering essay by a prominent British scholar in the field of women's poetry (I've been searching in my files for the exact citation, not least since I'd like to read it again myself). Each recent generation of women poets, the scholar writes, mistakenly thinks itself immune to the invisible fate of its foremothers. And our own is no exception. Her prediction, based on her expertise in the history of women's poetry, is that if we don't ground themselves consciously in the work of the women poets before us, our efforts to add our voices to the ongoing poetic conversation will be in vain; we will be eroded, like decimated soil in a land where there are no trees, no roots, to hold anything together. Like the "poetesses" who once sold better than their male contemporaries but are now almost entirely erased, even contemporary women poets, in all the glorious affluent multitudinousness of our equality, are only as strong as the foremothers and precursors and mentors we choose to claim as our own, to 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. Books like these lend hope that such building may now be possible at last.