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.
Annie,
Are you familiar with the second photograph of Dickinson (in her thirties), discovered a few years ago? Quite haunting, really. The case for its authenticity is pretty strong.
Kent
HIi Kent,
Yes—a wonderful photo. Nice to see you here!
AF
Annie,
This is fascinating post, especially this central passage on Moore and Bishop:
“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.”
I suspect you are very right about Moore and her mother. Linda Leavell in a 2002 paper called “Marianne Moore, her Family and Their Language” describes a hot house of letter writing and linguistic prankishness. Marianne also attended a school where her mother was a teacher. And yet Leavell, as though to confirm your own central thesis in this post, says nothing about Marianne’s reading.
There’s an excellent old review (New York Times, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2DF1530F933A05752C1A960948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all ) by Grace Shulman called “A GUSTO FOR DUMBO AND BALANCHINE.” on The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore.
It fills in a little more information and two paragraphs seem worth citing:
“Her own enthusiasm was ignited by two prose craftsmen – Sir Thomas Browne, for whom, she points out, ‘’small things could be great things,” and Henry James, whom she describes in a major essay of 1934, ”Henry James as a Characteristic American.” ”Things for Henry James glow, flush, glimmer, vibrate, shine, hum, bristle, reverberate,” she exclaims. ”Some complain of his transferred citizenship as a loss; but when we consider the trend of his fiction and his uncomplacent denouements, we have no scruple about insisting that he was American; not if the American is, as he thought, ‘intrinsically and actively ample, . . . reaching westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere,’ with a mind ‘incapable of the shut door in any direction.’ ”
and:
The prose of Marianne Moore is not, however, simply a source for her poetry. For her it has its own integrity and importance. In 1925 she declares her indebtedness to – apart from Bacon, Browne and James -Defoe, Bunyan, Leigh Hunt, Edmund Burke and Joseph Conrad. She refers to many of them in her essays and learns from their methods. Writing of George Moore’s prose, for example, she observes that he, like Defoe, has ”preciseness without apparent effort to be precise, the effect of discursiveness unrehearsed.” In her work she too labored hard to appear effortless. In 1965 she quotes George Grosz, the caricaturist, as calling for ”endless curiosity, observation, research, and a great amount of joy in the thing.” In an essential essay, ”Idiosyncrasy and Technique,” she reveals: ”One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one’s happiness to express.”
And yet this says nothing about the poetical antecedents. We know that she was very close indeed to Stevens, Williams and Eliot. That admired H.D. and Pound.
And she must have, since she based her prosody on syllabic duration, read Sidney, Spencer and Campion thoroughly.
Beyond that, you’re right, the trail peters out.
You wonder about Bishop as well: “But what happened to the chain after that? Did Bishop ever mentor another woman poet?”
If there was anyone that Bishop seriously mentored it was Robert Lowell, evidenced by the recent volumes of letters, though really only obliquely in the poems themselves. I would suggest that one of the reasons that Bishop doesn’t seem to have mentored other women poets has to do with the fact that she lived for so long outside of America. There were obviously no American woman poets at hand in Brazil. And Bishop spent a great deal of time trying to master Portuguese, which she was probably never thoroughly successful at, as there are no letters of hers written in Portuguese, at least that I know of, and she never really engaged with the Brazilian literati in a serious way. Once back in America she felt relieved to be in the midst of English again and described the experience of listening to Portuguese conversations as being like a dog nodding his head back and forth at the dinner conversation. Immersion in Portuguese must have been painful, but also necessary for the kind of poet she was, and she was not alone, certainly, as a woman poet, opting for exile and travel as a form of self-mentoring.
At any rate, this is a fabulous post.
Martin
“Each recent generation of women poets, the scholar writes, mistakenly thinks itself immune to the invisible fate of its foremothers.”
Very interesting. And perhaps why we don’t see the strong mentoring relationships between women. I have my doubts that my gender knows how to mentor, or be mentored, in general. Though as your presence, and the anthology tells us, there are certainly women who do…too brief a reply, I know, but this is a topic that has some mileage! But one question, do you think mentoring is necessarily an inherent skill?
Dear Annie,
Thanks for posting this! I too devoured this book on women mentors in poetry with great interest. I will say that I have been positively inspired by many women poets that I have encountered – in person and by e-mail – whether the intellectual ferocity of poets like Alicia Ostriker and Colleen McElroy, the charming enthusiasm of Denise Duhamel, the wonderful warmth and honesty of Dorianne Laux, or my circle of poet-friends (male and female) online who continue to cheer one other on, despite the continuous “poetry-is-a-competition-and-only-one-can-win” mindset of so many in the poetry world. Your creation of Wompo has also created an outlet for so many writers with questions, queries, who are looking for a place for connection. It is so inspiring to see so many committing willful acts of generosity across generations, across country, across languages and cultures. I am so grateful for the mentoring I have received – both formal and informal – over the last ten years, and I hope I can extend as much grace to others as has been extended to me.
Take care,
Jeannine
Annie, thanks for this wonderful post. It really lifted my spirits, which weren’t feeling too, um, great. I read an essay by you in 13th Moon a few years ago that was so persuasive and inspiring, it practically changed my life. You said that just as men have always been busy writing about each other, women should get busy and write about each other. Now with your new post, I feel mightily encouraged to no longer “disavow in shame” and ignore “the invisible fate of the foremothers.” Here’s something I wrote in 2005. Since then, Lillian has become my mentor, a steady, faithful, brilliant, sensitive reader of my work. What a dream! I can hardly believe my luck! Thanks to her, my poems have vastly improved. I highly recommend mentoring.
Felicitous Faderman
Who defines the literary canon? Surely, there is no better example than Lillian Faderman, the groundbreaking scholar and author of Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the 17th Century to the Present. Her aesthetic sense is flawless; her love for lesbian literature is palpable; her prose is exquisitely clear; and her scholarship is open and exciting.
As a lesbian poet, I was starved for Chloe Plus Olivia. I needed an anthology to act as a guide and teacher. I needed a lesbian literary canon to interact with. In my book, Lillian Faderman is a star. Not just because she has published so many books and won so many prestigious awards, but because she forged ahead, alone, through unknown territory. When everyone else was ignoring or disparaging lesbian literature, Faderman treasured it. I also learned about Faderman’s integrity directly from her.
In terms of the current grand poetry industry, I am a nobody. But when I sent Dr. Faderman a sonnet, she wrote back with praise and encouragement. Her kindness felt like suddenly being airlifted from a shack in Siberia to a loft on Christopher Street. I felt like less of an outsider, and, in some small way, suddenly part of lesbian literature. Dr. Faderman offered to write an afterword for my book! Can you imagine?! I absolutely adore her.
Mary Meriam, 2005
Martin, thanks so much for these great citations and thoughts re the dangling ends of the Bishop-Moore mentorship chain. I’m intrigued by the idea that Bishop was mentored by her experience of Portuguese, or that it was necessary for her as a poet to have that alienation–it reminds me of the impact on Eliot of his time living in France; it defamiliarized English for him and deeply affected his prosody.
Jeannine, it ’s a really fun book, isn’t it? It brings the idea of mentorship into the present, into our own lives, and makes it feel more possible.
LH, your brief post is very thought-provoking. I think you are on to something when you say that maybe one reason women don’t mentor is we are in denial about our vulnerability to oblivion. It’s as if we don’t quite make the leap to take responsiblity for our collective fates as poets. Maybe one reason for this has been the temptation to look to men for mentorship, since they already know how, and historically their opinions and patronage have been the only ones that mattered anyway. Think of Dickinson sending her poems to Higginson (but rebuffing Helen Hunt Jackson’s repeated efforts to publish her), or Plath (another woman poet who seems to have been mentored by her mother, btw) hooking up with Hughes.
In answer to your question, I do think mentoring is a skill, but not necessarily an inherent skill. My guess is it snowballs from generation to generation, with each new generation mentoring better than they were mentored. The preface to Women Poets & Mentorship book claims, correctly I think, that the current generation of young women poets is the first that has ever known widespread female mentoring (thanks largely, of course, to the MFA system). Hopefully their own mentees will get an even better variety.
An interesting subtext of the book–perhaps a testament to the pathetic state of female poetic mentoring– is how little actual mentoring activity some of the mentors included here actually DID. A large group of them are mentors by default, just by virtue of existing, and the young mentees are grateful to them simply for existing. So are they mentoring? Another large group are simply doing their job–teaching students–and don’t go beyond those prescribed activities. So are they really mentoring? Or just teaching? Is it possible that mentorship is more in the eye of the mentee than of the mentor? Or will we become more exacting in our definition of what female mentoring is, once we have more of it? My guess is that if this were a book about mentorship among male poets, the bar of what constitutes mentoring would be raised considerably higher. Jeannine, having read Efforts and Affections, would you agree?
Mary, it’s great to read your post, and I love your Faderman piece–and doesn’t it show the power of an anthology! (cf Camille’s post elsewhere on Harriet, on anthologies that have changed HER life).
I’m very sorry to hear that about Carolyn Kizer’s memory. Some 30 years ago, when I worked at a copy shop in Berkeley, she would occasionally arrive late at night in her bathrobe to pick up copies of her poems. Talk about poetic mothers. My own mother used to go out in bathrobe also to do night errands.
Annie, thanks for the thoughtful post. And the useful resources. It is bracing and good and necessary to be reminded that Dickinson was mothered by others – by what sounds like a pretty rich tradition of female poets.
Dear Annie,
Reading your post I immediately remembered four women who I could cite as poet-foremothers but who I haven’t written about or spoken about in those terms– Judith Johnson, Lisel Mueller, Mari Evans, and Elaine Chamberlain. Reading what you write has made me want to think harder about those women and their tremendous impact on my writing life. Of the four I only never met Mari Evans, but I encountered her work, and Elaine Chamberlain’s the earliest, when I was still in junior high and high school. Judy Johnson is the only one with whom I am still in touch; she was my creative writing teacher in college and is the one responsible (okay Mom and Dad don’t send her angry letters) for dissuading me from my intended path to law-school into the dangerous road of the poet.
But even after Judy “saved” me, I still went into politics and organizing upon graduation. While my friends went on the MFA and PhD programs (I wanted to go with them honestly, but couldn’t get accepted to graduate school, not for years and years!) I worked first in Albany and then Washignton DC to work for various state wide and national organizations. I will never quite forget what it was like, when I was 27 years old, having just quit a four-year career in organizing, sitting in the cafeteria of the Motorola factory in Elma, NY where I then worked, reading the poem “Monet Refuses the Operation” by Lisel Mueller and feeling the earth shift beneath me. I wrote to Mueller care of her publisher, LSU Press, and Mueller wrote back. Imagine that.
Annie, can you tell us the names of some of the “poetesses” who Dickinson read and admired? I’m glad you mentioned Kizer, because doesn’t her “Pro Femina” somewhat discuss this issue?
XO
Kazim
Great post, Annie.
Maggie Nelson’s Women of the NY School book brings up interesting ideas about women poets and mentorship–the floating workshops Eileen Myles ran in New York, Bernadette Mayer’s work at St. Mark’s, etc.
Bishop and Moore’s relationship made me think about two other modernist women poets with close (for a time) ties: H.D. and Amy Lowell. Who was mentoring whom there?
Also: Is the whole idea of “mentorship” a concept so rooted in patriarchy (or the classic (ha!) sense of pederasty) that it could be better just to find a whole new model?
Hi Annie,
Loved your post. Interesting food for thought. I wonder why most women poets who we think of as mentors–Gertrude Stein for example–almost only exclusively mentor men. And also, does a mentorship have to be a face-to-face encounter, or does influence count as an element in the mentoring processes
Do you find the argument that there is an undercurrent of rivalry at the base of all female to female relationships to hold water? I know many third wave feminists attempted to thwart this idea.
Roberto
to Travis re mentorship:
Yes it was Athena (herself a patriarchal displacement of the trinity Goddess Athene-Metis-Madusa that predated her, sprung full-grown from the brow of Zeus, sexless and motherless) who took the voice of Mentor to uphold the kingship of Odysseus and avert the impending war.
Perhaps by restoring to Athena her aspects of Metis and Medusa we might learn more about what either of those other two aspects might have said through the mouth of Mentor.
I always, as a writer, particularly related to Medusa, could not be gazed upon, from whose severed neck flew another full-grown offspring Pegasus. It’s Medusa, not Athena/Mentor, whose the real mythological mother of Poetry.
K
Why don’t women poets mentor other women poets more: that’s a fascinating question. Also important: why is it that some women poets don’t want a mentor? Could it be because such a mentor would be a mother figure, and that the daughter’s relationship with her own mother was stifling in some way, so she’s fearful of being smothered or overwhelmed?
And how do we define mentoring in the first place? If it’s mostly to encourage, then that’s easy enough. What could be more life-affirming than to have your work praised and appreciated by an older poet whose work you love? This can be galvanizing, catalyzing. If it’s to introduce you to important career venues, that’s both practical and marvelous! If it’s to swirl a finger in the younger person’s creative juices … not so good.
Judging from the content of E. Bishop’s letters to R. Lowell, as much as she appreciated and even doted on her mentor Marianne Moore, she speaks of Moore in a dismissive tone sometimes. It suggests dicey undercurrents in the relationship, rivalry perhaps. Or perhaps Moore herself became needy over time. (And let’s not forget Moore’s arrogant and dismissive treatment of Sylvia Plath who had sent her some poems.)
The mentoring relationship isn’t right for everyone, nor is it necessary to conceive of one’s contemporaries or forbears–those who inspire you–in terms of the mentorship paradigm.
This is a very interesting topic — thank you Annie. I wrote a short essay recently which starts with the idea of where to find a mentor: http://www.agendapoetry.co.uk/documents/NotesForBroadsheetPoets11.pdf
I consider whether mentors are a thing of the past, and whether we able to mentor ourselves. I wonder how odd my choice of mentors will seem here…
All the best,
Caroline
Mentoring
Annie told me about this blog and her posting and I would like to comment. Sorry for the length. I saw the book advertised in the _WRofB_ and it caught my eye because the picture reproduced is one I use for my mascot in library thing. It was not identified in _WRoB_. It’s by Georg Friedrich Kersting, (1785 – 1847), sometimes called A Lady by a Window, when it’s clearly a lady writing by a window.
I’d like to address this subject in a two-prong way (I’m imagining a fork with two prongs). One was brought up by Annie: what do we mean by mentoring, when did the word begin to be used in the way we are using it. I went to my (old, bought sometime in the early 1990s) OED and found 4 uses of mentor, the 1st by Chesterfield to his son in 1750 where he refers to the “friendly care and assistance” of his son’s mentor; the 2nd Wm Cowper (18th century poet) who writes “the friend sticks close, a mentor worthy of his charge; a third one which is an allusion to the origin of the term: Mentor was the tutor of Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, and in the 17th century Fenelon wrote a didactic epic called _Telemaque_ where Mentor is the loving guide, tutor, companion in travels of Telemaque. It’s from this poem the modern term emerges. The 4th I don’t recognize but the sentence is X was “helped in the selection by the experience of his mentor.” All men — though girls read _Telemaque as did boys in the 18th century.
It doesn’t get us anywhere much for the OED doesn’t tell us how frequently this term is used. I have the sense that it has in the last decade suddenly become a fashionable term.
Do we know what we mean by it? Probably one person’s mentoring is like teaching: an art and reflects the character and circumstances of the two people, but I fear the term is getting to be overused. I was asked to be her mentor by a young woman who was in one of my classes last term; it seems I am supposed to advise her about what books to read and help her with her thesis. Thus far I have done very little, mainly because what she really asks for I know little of (she’s interested in studying educational theory), and she lives far away from me, and has two children so we have to communicate by email. When I met the man who set this mentoring program up, I realized that what was happening was an attempt to help people going to Individualized BAs to have some contact with a real human being as their courses and teachers don’t provide this enough. But there is no natural or set-up structure. I know that over the years of teaching at GMU I tend to get friendly (that’s the best way to put it) with a certain kind of young woman, someone congenial, and what happens is she visits me a lot, and I’ve helped a number of young women write some of the material they need to apply for graduate programs. More: I’ve talked with them about what counts in their life, not like a mother, more like an older woman friend who they feel understands. It’s gotten deep enough I’ve influenced a couple, gone out to lunch with several, though not more than once. It’s simply true that they have (though not the present girl I am said to be officially mentoring) not white, often from another culture, Middle Eastern, Iran, or Spanish-American, and having a hard time adjusting to American ways.
As for myself I wish I had had a mentor, an older woman friend or teacher, but it never happened. My mentors were my books, and for the most part the prose theoretical ones (say about translation) were by men. Maybe I turned to translation to get close to a woman. I have only translated women’s poetry and poetry from the Renaissance. The person who encouraged me to be an English major was a man (black, a rarity as a professor in 1965, Clinton F. Oliver), to go to graduate school was a man (a novelist, Robert Towers), my advisor for my dissertation was a man, Robert Adams Day. Ah, but the book was _Clarissa_ and if by a man, it is the fertile terrain (I think) where much of novel tradition for women began, and his book came out of women’s novels before him, beginning with the later 17th century French novelists (like Lafayette). _Clarissa_ means a lot to me; I’ve just finished writing a paper defending the film adaptation for a coming 18th century conference. Just reread it through for the 6th time.
I do need and crave to be reading a certain kind of women’s novel or memoir: I call it a “woman’s book to be getting on with,” a paraphrase from a line in a poem by Fleur Adock where she says she has a few friends to be getting on with. Right now it’s Jhumpa Lahiri’s _Unaccustomed to Earth_. I am riveted to it at 3 in the morning when I can’t sleep.
One more thing before I turn to argue that women poets have had mentors, but the older, say pre-20th century evidence is not direct and found mostly in letters and poems of friendship to one another (occasionally in rival poems where they are rivalling one another — as a set of 4 poems between Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara). The poems of 20th century women to earlier women seem to be to voice a sense of inspiration and thank the woman for having existed and survived (or not) the way she did as a model and for imaginative company and solace. It’s this: while films made by women and some about women too continually show women in groups (often a quartet), they are made fun of for this. Such movies get heavily women audiences and are often dissed (_Jane Austen Book Club_ is one). They flop. Now there are commercial successes, but these are often films where the women get together to find a man (_Sex and the City_) or deal with male promiscuity (another obsession of women’s films especially by women.& plays too, especially by women when they are not lesbian works or about lesbians).
It’s a matter of ridicule and makes norms uncomfortable for women to show themselves getting together as a positive and non-man getting or family thing (like baby sitting communities). Another term important here which gets me to history: bluestockings. I am convinced the origin of the term — no matter what people say — is lost in the mists of time. It begins in that later 17th century I referred to above and is still a term of derogation and denigration. Bluestockings are resented as not wanting men above all, not having children — in the group pictures the reading & writing woman is often presented as either ugly or a difficult or a hidden lesbian. Still to today. Go see _The Women_ 2008 by Diane English. So it’s hidden or not brought out clearly.
Also mentors are connections and ambitious women look for connections that can get them something. Men are better connected. Much better heeled (cf the _NYRB_ to the WRofB_).
Women have had mentors. The most often quoted is Austen’s in Chapter 5 of her _Northanger Abbey_: after excoriating and ridiculing the praise given to male anthologers and decrying how novelists (and she’s thinking of women, especially Charlotte Smith, her mentor if you will) often have their heroine not read novels, she tells us of “Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda … only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” She was unusual. Other women then _and now_ give men as their predecessors. Burney went to Riccoboni, but she tells of Marivaux, Smollett, Fielding. Ann Patchett recently wants us to believe her _Bel Canto_ was influenced by _The Magic Mountain_; maybe, but I think it was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s _The Secret Garden_. No one could love Woolf’’s work more than I but she tells us of the Greek classics when what she read a lot of were women’s novels and every once in a while she suddenly will blurt out something about Mary Ward (that is Mrs Humphry). I believe her new technique was more against Ward than Bennet or Galsworthy (but they are respectable).
If you go into period anthologies, you find lots of stories of women’s friendships, poems written in terms of one another, but there really does seem to be a de-emphasis even in recent anthologies of women’s poetry, only some of which are by women. A rare emphasis is on the bluestocking group where they left letters but they don’t use the term mentor. I see it in the later 17th century English women poets of the Restoration, and much in the 19th century women too. People in pop publications like to denigrate or use people who are different as warnings so again the emphasis tends to be on relationships which broke down. One is of Anne Yearsley who was patronized (in the bad as well as good sense of the word) by Hannah More, and broke off the relationship because the upper class More insisted on controlling Yearsley’s money as if Yearsley was not capable of it. I’ve gone on too long and haven’t cited enough early women, but it’s there, only amorphous, sometimes at long distance and easily made tenuous because circumstances didn’t support this sort of thing unless the women were biologically or maritally related or worked in the same place (like a court)..
Ellen Moody
Dear Annie,
I do agree with you. I was also taken by surprise that some of the essays descriptions weren’t really about mentorship at all – they were about being in a vacuum and getting encouragement and support by reading only or learning to sustain themselves in their writing life despite their lack of mentor.
I hope that’s not representative of the current generation of women writers and their lack – like I said in my previous note, I have been very lucky – especially, startlingly, after my twenties – to be encouraged by a wide variety of other women writers – some within the context of getting my MFA, but outside of that circle as well.
I wonder about one thing – I notice at writer’s conferences and meetings that men are much more aggressive about going up to men they admire and asking directly for help – which I haven’t observed as often with women. I consider myself pretty confident in general, but even I get a little tongue-tied and shy around writers I really admire. I hope that’s not holding a lot of women writers back – or that I’m not “blaming the victim”.
This is such a fascinating discussion! Thanks, Annie, for starting it on Harriet.
Take care, Jeannine
A P.S. I did omit what I think is the core sense in which the word “mentor” is often used today. It refers to someone who tells you the “unwritten rules.” When I helped my young women write their materials for applying to graduate school, I would tell them what was expected that wasn’t written down. I also would tell them where the demands were hypocritical or not really meant: such as a personal statement which asks for personal reasons or experiences. Some of these young women took that seriously, and I helped them revise their statements so the personal material would be marginalized.
It’s a narrow meaning and is not the kind of full relationship suggested in the idea of one women mentoring another, but it is a (I think) an accurate description of the way the word is often used.
Last: I do feel not quite envy but a wish I had had a woman mentor and know of women in their forties who did have all women professors to be advisors and mentors. They wrote different kinds of dissertations. They were encouraged to study women authors (as I was not — though not discourged). And the theses and attitudes of mind they wanted to express were encouraged and developed, which in my case would have been frowned upon, not understood, though to be not professional.
Ellen
Annie,
Just getting back to this post now. I concur, it doesn’t seem to be an inherent skill. Many of the women I have had conversations with tend to feel less than excited about a mentoring relationship. The whole teaching dynamic is another matter of course, we are paid to mentor and the role is more clearly defined. The point you gave from the introduction to the anthology speaks volumes about the lack of practice at this though, and I hope this new generation is a little better.
I had a brief conversation this week with a poet who has inadvertently mentored me for years through her poetry and her presence in the world, though never directly. She was, as I find many women to be, very skeptical about the mentor/mentee relationship. What are women with power supposed to do? she asked. What does it mean to mentor? Is it simply being a cheerleader? An introducer? A promoter? All good questions and worth thinking about.
Well, here are some of the things I am trying to do as part of my poetic practice not necessarily as someone who teaches but simply as a poet in the world: invite women to read, discuss and teach their books, challenge each other to read beyond comfort zones, to cross pollinate, to create spaces for discourse, ask questions of their texts and practices. To me, more important than cheerleading is challenging me to grow.
Hi Annie,
I don’t know if you also saw the piece it did on How2 last Spring where I interviewed Rachel and Arielle about the book and other. There is also a good essay there by Jen Benka on Muriel Rukeyser.
Annie,
I think we need to look at this subject a little more rationally and not so emotionally.
Asking a poet ‘who mentored you?’ is similar to asking the poet, ‘who made you?’ Every poet would have a thousand answers: I was made by the earth, the sea, the dust, the wind, God, Fortuna, by my mother and father, by my country, my playmates, my friends, my teachers, my school, my mishaps and misfortunes, by all that I am and by all that I have seen and felt. Mentoring falls into the same category. Oh, sure it can get more specific, as in ‘X got me my first job,’ or ‘Y was the first person to read my poetry with sympathy,’ but ‘mentoring’ is like ‘making;’ nearly everyone is responsible, and hardships, obstacles, even doom, and the poet herself, not the least of these.
How we be scientific, about this, then? It feels utterly anecdotal to me. Bishop did write like Moore AT ALL (or at least not more than any modern poet one might choose). So what are we really talking about here? Is this just morale-boosting? I don’t object; I’m just curious.
That’s the first thing. Secondly, how can we expect women poets to trace mentoring (already a hard thing to track, period) back through generations, when men were the prominent poets going backwards, for the most part? Shakespeare was a guy. You’d be silly to be an English-speaking women poet after Shakespeare and not be a little mentored by this dude. Or Milton, or Pope. Today, it’s another story. There are women poets all over the place.
I agree with you that women poets, and especially 19th century women poets, are given short shrift. One of the reasons Poe is considered a critical hack is because he spent so much time and space reviewing those 19th century women poets–to revise our opinions of them, we’d have to revise our opinions of Poe–nearly impossible, since so many glorious resumes (TS Eliot, Harold Bloom) boast of Poe-trampling. Elizabeth Barrett was one of those poets who Poe spent a lot of energy reviewing; I noticed you called her Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and I did not know Dickinson had Barrett’s picture on the wall, which is interesting, and also interesting is that you left that fact hanging; why don’t we talk about Elizabeth Barrett? She was a famous poet before she met Robert, far more famous than he was, when they eloped, and developed the dramatic poem before he did, which he is now famous for; she, famous only for the love sonnet she wrote to him. Well, love is catnip to poetry, and always will be, and maybe the best ‘mentoring’ dynamic of all.
Emerson was credited with writing one of the few Dickinson poems that surfaced during the 19th century. Emerson didn’t dirty his hand reviewing women poets like Poe, and Emerson’s reputation today is better for it. Men and women swooning over each other in the poetical realm is so Victorian, so 19th century, so un-cool! Imagine if Dickinson and Higginson (quite a guy if you read about him) had been as romantically blockbuster as Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning! Something tells me Dickinson’s star would be as low as Barrett-Browning’s is today.
This really is a complex topic as all these responses point out. A few large questions seem to be surfacing. One is about women poets of the past, and how they were mentored. When the rare woman poet crops up in the 16th or 17th or 18th century—a Louise Labe, or an Amelia Lanier–there must be a mentor in the background somewhere. How I would love to know the stories of how those lives in poetry began. I told Ellen Moody about this post, in hopes that her long expetise on women’s poetry of previous centures might include some insight on these questions.
Another big question seems to be, what is mentoring anyway? How is it done? It would be fun to see people’s tips on mentoring here–female and male. What are the essentials? What attitude makes a mentor? Is there any essential difference between a poetic mentor and a poetry teacher? What about the kind of blatant career-boosting that, I agree, is so common among male mentors helping out younger poets, and seems so rare among women? Is that a truer form of mentorship?
My own experience jibes with Jeannine’s, that women poets ask less for mentorship than men, as a rule. This may be the reason for Roberto’s observation that Stein and other women tend to mentor men more (imagine if Sylvia Beach had mentored a woman instead of mentoring Joyce–or if Lady Augusta Gregory or Harriet Monroe had made a point to mentor women). Men ask more. They really do. Roberto and others have made a stab at explaining the reasons women don’t ask for mentoring. Is it mothering anxiety? Kim Chernin’s classic of female psychology The Hungry Self talks about women’s fear of surpassing their mothers, and that may apply to mentoring as well.
Or is it rivalry between women, that 1950’s stereotype? That stereotype has been explained convincingly as competition for the limited favors granted by the patriarchy to token women. The fact is, nowadays women tend to give less mentorship than men when they ARE asked, and often they use the justification that their recommendations won’t be heeded much anyway by publishers, granting agencies, etc. Again,in that case, it seems the only way out of the situation is for women poets to stop depending on patriarchal favor and instead to build alternate structures.
Travis, it may be that mentorship is a patriarchal concept but my guess is that many women poets would like to have a chance at its benefits, before throwing the model entirely out the window ( : Still, you make a valuable point. Maybe a kind of collaborative, communitarian model of building alternative structures from the ground up–something like the Dusie Kollektiv chapbook project— is indeed replacing traditional lending-a-leg-up mentorship.
Thanks for the links, Caroline and Jennifer. I’m looking forward to checking them out.
Thomas, this is a fascinating remark, and I think you have a point. “Imagine if Dickinson and Higginson (quite a guy if you read about him) had been as romantically blockbuster as Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning! Something tells me Dickinson’s star would be as low as Barrett-Browning’s is today.” Woman poets known to be actively heterosexual are remarkably absent from the thin ranks of seriously respected women poets today. There seems to be a kind of cognitive dissonance around linking those two concepts of woman-who-loves-a-man and poet together, and I agree with you that it has a lot to do with the reason we don’t talk about Elizabeth Barrett anymore.
I believe there are two reasons as as to why true mentoring relationships (not just via someone’s books) are not common amongst women poets.
The first is that to be a mentor, to use that label, she must believe she has authority on the subject. In my experience, even very established women writers shy away from proclaiming this. Is it insecurity? A lack of hubris? Perhaps–huge generalization–women are more likely to live in the grey, believing we all still have so much to learn, we are evolving, we are all so different. Other than in a teaching situation, how could someone claim to have enough experience and wisdom to bestow to use that label? I see it is much more common to have a group of peers as support, as a sounding board.
Also, while this definitely does not apply to all women poets, those who are mothers simply have very little extra time to give. Family obligations take so much time and often it is a struggle to find enough time for their own writing. Creating the brain-space and time to worry about the careers of others becomes such a low priority.
This is a very interesting post. I’m really looking forward to see how the conversation progresses. Thanks for starting it. I know I’ll be thinking about this a lot.
I thought I should clarify that my mentoring, such as it is, isn’t only reserved for women, rather that I seem to have go out of my way to mentor young women. They don’t necessarily show up the way young men do, with questions and reasons to engage. Perhaps just as I had no idea how to be mentored. It is a strange relationship and perhaps not inherent for those being mentored either.
For my own part, it was at the heckling and encouragement of a few male poets that I began to add my voice to the blog world, and I thank them for the shove. I think!
Annie,
“Woman poets known to be actively heterosexual are remarkably absent from the thin ranks of seriously respected women poets today.”
Are you quite certain?
even sticking to the most conservative definition of “seriously respected”, and sticking to Americas, in 30 seconds I get
Jorie Graham
Louise Gluck
Alice Notley
Lyn Hejinian
CD Wright
Anne Waldman
Susan Howe
Annie, you must be trying to make some more specific or nuanced point?–taken literally, your claim seems outlandish….
IN response again,
The word is problematic, e.g.,
I don’t see how one can exclude the official teaching relationship. Unofficial teaching is central to mentorship of an interactive face-to-face, phoning and letters kind. Mentor was Telemachus’s tutor.
He also replaced Odysseus while Odysseus was gone away to Troy and wandering about the seas. So it was in part a father-son relationship. My own experience, what I’ve read and seen tells me the analogous mother-daughter one is far more fraught.
I’d like to exclude patronesses unless they were deeply congenial to the writer. So I don’t know if Amelia Lanier’s patroness (to whom she wrote the beautiful country-house landscape poem that has come down to us) was congenial, encouraging. I assume so, but one can pretend and flatter. However, it’s probably wrong to exclude patronesses since obviously one of the modern ways one mentors (as the word is understood today) is to help forward someone’s career.
I myself think of reading another women’s work deeply as being mentored by her. But that is actually vague, sort of hard to prove, and unless the woman is on record saying that such a reading relationship was of immense intense importance to her (as some women are), we will perhaps assert a relationship that wasn’t there. Rivalry is probably not mentorship most of the time, but it can function that way: to spur on through emulation.
Turning to earlier women (pre-10th century): the forms of proof are poems (friendship, in imitation, in admiration), letters and what’s said in them, biographies, documents which may record the two lived together or wrote (the letters not having survived). In each case it takes looking into the case carefully for (as Greer said) women’s writing far from being saved, was often destroyed, regarded as biodegradable. The analogy is here is telling if a woman had a career since the outward appearance of a woman’s career before and including the 20th century looks quite different from a man’s.
Ellen
Lemon and Nick, Sorry, to clarify, when I made that remark I was caught up in the discussion about literary history, and I meant “canonical” women poets–obviously, the situation is very different for contemporary women poets, as this book, for one thing, makes clear!!! I’d be very interested to see if anyone comea up with a list of “seriously respected” women meeting that description who were publishing before, say, 1960. Sorry for the confusion.
Ellen, thanks for your posts. Wasn’t Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, a mentor for Amelia Lanier? I think Sidney was the first woman poet published in England, and was a mentor for several women writers, as well as a muse and supporter for male poets, such as Spenser. My understanding is that Mary Sidney founded Wilton Circle, one of the most important literary coteries.
Dear Mary,
There’s a strong tendency to reify and half-invent things like “salons” and close relationships between early modern women for which there is little evidence. A case I investigated was that of Katherine Philips. She is credited witha “salon.” If you look,you find she had a bunch of women and men friends while she lived in London, but there is no evidence for her as a saloniere, which is quite a different thing.
I’ve not read about Sidney in a while, but my reading at the time suggested to me she kept close to her family female and court connections and later in life was not social. She met Lanier but there is no evidence of particular favors; they might know one another’s poetry, but that’s not the same as mentorship. Sidney had a lot to hide, was a rather bitter sort,and they were of a very different class, with disparate status, Mary Sidney high and Emily Lanier not. This counted enormously in this era. Further, Mary Sidney’s poetry is quite different from the Lanier type: Lanier’s imitates Jonson and Daniel in their more Horatian phases or she is a throw back to earlier Renaissance forms; what she does is change the country house landscape poem to feminize it into a poem of friendship and patronage by a woman to a woman. Sidney is highly inventive and is a sonneteer in the woman’s Petrarchan mode (something in and of itself, coming to her from Colonna and others in Italy), but like Stampa (a courtesan from Venice so not with that much to lose when she’s frank), very daring too, explicit about sex as Lanier never is. It was daring of Sidney and I’ve thought shows her need to express herself fully and tell of her life. Her novel is a roman a clef. She got hysterical when it began to circulate and did all she could to stop the novel spreading because of the early reactions to it.
In a way too much talk about mentorship doesn’t help women either. We lose what makes them different.
I mentioned the denigration and even hatred of Bluestockings and how ridicule of women in groups and the organization of society works against women mentorship in my first. Well, a story about a young woman who won a high scholarship at Oxford demonstrates my point:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5818247.ece
The reaction to Gail Trimble in the words of the Times online article… ’swung wildly between gross sexual insults and gross sexual invitations.’ The article links this back to the bluestockings and the long history of prejudice and discrimination against educated and intelligent women. Do you think this young woman will seek a woman mentor? Well, today she appears in the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/4887275/University-Challenge-winner-Gail-Trimble-to-marry.html
a story I think deliberately inserted by friends, where she looks prettier, though still wearing glasses and without make-up (gasp!) and we are told she’s engaged to be married. So you see she’s all right after all.
Ellen
Annie,
My post to you never showed up, so I’m going to try again,
Yes, Elizabeth Barrett was a thousand times more worldly than Emily Dickinson, wrote epics, famous in her time, eloped w/ a major poet, was surrounded by famous people in Florence, etc. Yet Dickinson is a thousand times more popular. Barrett had this invalid/mom domesticated Victorian thing going on, however, and this might be part of the reason she’s not popular. (She is a good poet.)
Perhaps Barrett never recovered from her one iconic love sonnet, and this leads into your statement: “Woman poets known to be actively heterosexual are remarkably absent from the thin ranks of seriously respected women poets today” –which I think is true, Annie!
Dickinson, Moore, Bishop, Plath (writing her last great poems during divorce and before suicide) all fit what you are saying; Millay, a counter-example, is neglected, even snubbed by Hugh Kenner of ‘The Pound Era,’ for instance, the Modernist clique (to which Moore somewhat belonged) was rather sexist, so I think your statement is correct.
It would be fascinating to explore the ‘why’ of your statement…
Anyway, thanks for this thread,
Thomas
Thomas,
Yes, not true at all of contemporary women poets, as has been said, but does seem to be true of women poets publishing before the mid-20h century. Why? is a very good question.
Feminist theory can shed some light (for example, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, with its famous first sentence, “is the pen a metaphorical penis?”). In the patriachal view, the male is considered the self-sufficient norm, and the female exists only in relation to the male and as a lesser version of him.
So, when the female is manifestly placed in relation to the male, as when Millay writes poems about being a woman in relation to men, the female ia automatically discounted as lesser than the male-who-has-been-invoked-by-her-poetry, even if he is nameless. Since poets need to be respected as self-sufficient, a woman poet who identifies as a woman in this way can’t, ipso facto, be respected as a poet in this kind of social context.
Back again a few days later and typing on a laptop from a hotel in NYC.
I find important Annie’s idea there is less mentoring between women in the 20th century than before. It’s impossible to quantify such a relationship nor count them before the 20th century. So much has been destroyed. So much is never written down. And women didn’t have careers to record such things before the 19th. Yet I feel that women turned to other women — partly they did have low expectations. Outcries like Austen’s are rare and couched in irony.
In the interim I’ve been reading the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann. While two of her more moving poems are to Nelly Sachs (who won the Nobel after all), her relationship with Paul Celan and Max Frisch are cited as the ones that counted. It may be true they helped her get published or connections more than Sachs. And the fame is about her love affairs with them. Her book Malina reinforces that. But the tones of the poems to Sachs are so deeply intinate and full of understanding.
Bachmann is one famous woman poet who was actively heterosexual. Alas she came to a sad end: towards the end self exiled reclusive drinking heavily she burnt to death in a fire of her own making – she failed to put out one of her cigarettes.
Just some thoughts reinforcing and qualifying Annie’s.
Ellen
Annie
I find it really interesting to ‘eavesdrop’ on the opinions and public expressions of taste by highly educated poets on poetry and poets, because I find my tastes and opinions, while very much formed by twenty-five years of intensive reading, have Not been formed in response to what feels expected or intellectual within the poetic community. I would have no problem confessing a great love of many of Millay’s gems or Dickinson’s beauties.
I find it very interesting that you mentioned Plath in your blog. I have recently connected Dickinson to Plath in way of influence. As both were confessional poets and both struggled with emotional problems and insecurity, as well as the fight against male dominance in society during their lifetimes. I believe that Dickinson had a large influence on Plath in writing style and in her mentality about writing poetry. Both poets wrote about unusual and unconventional topics as well as confronting death and sexuality; both radical topics for these women to write about during their times. It also seems as though both women write solely for themselves, as if they wished no one else to even ever see their work, their deep confessions of their souls. I would say Emily Dickinson falls more on the “bad” side of influence of Sylvia Plath, although I believe Plath would have followed her same path even if she had not clung so tightly onto the influence of Dickinson.