Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections

by Arielle Greenberg (Editor), Rachel Zucker (Editor)

Imagine being a young poet, nurturing your craft without the benefit of established mentors. Imagine having never been in a class taught by a woman poet or not having a bookshelf filled with books written by living women poets. Luckily, young women poets today don’t have to. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker’s Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections collects both personal essays and representative poems by women born after 1960 whose careers were influenced—directly or indirectly—by the women who preceded them.

The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women’s poetry.

Includes:
Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker
Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel
Miranda Field on Fanny Howe
Katie Ford on Jorie Graham
Joy Katz on Sharon Olds
Valerie Martínez on Joy Harjo
Erika Meitner on Rita Dove
Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye
Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley
Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido
Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton
Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

330 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2008

About the author

Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse Press, 2002), along with the chapbooks Shake Her (Dusie Kollektiv, edited and made by Jen Hofer, 2009) and Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals including the American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse and American Letters & Commentary, as well as the 2004 and 2005 editions of Best American Poetry and other anthologies. She serves as poetry editor for the journal Black Clock and is one of the founding editors of the journal Court Green, and is the founder and moderator of the poet-moms listserv. She is co-editor, with Rachel Zucker, of the anthology Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (University of Iowa Press, 2008) and, with Lara Glenum, of the poetry anthology Gurlesque (Saturnalia, forthcoming). The recipient of a Saltonstall individual artist's grant and a MacDowell Colony residency, she is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago and is currently living in Belfast, working on an oral history of the current back–to–the–land movement in Waldo County.

Reviews

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greenberg and Zucker have put together an innovative collection of essays by female poets (born after 1960) explaining how being mentored by a woman has impacted their work. Each essay is followed by poems from both the essay author and the poet she cites as having influenced her. It is evident from reading the poems that being mentored does not result in copycat poetry. There is a wide range of poetic styles and “camps.”

Many of the 24 poets share the frustration of believing their writing was stifled when it was critiqued by older male poets. Several state openly that they did not find their own unique voice until they connected with a female poet, or the work of a female poet. I was somewhat surprised by the essays where the poet had not met her mentor, but had, rather, been profoundly influenced by the work.

My favorite essay is by Erika Meitner, whose work I admire and re-read. She writes about Rita Dove.
“She taught me that writing and living are the same thing. In order to write, she said, you have to learn how to truly inhabit and push against the world rather than move through it as an afterthought. Poetry isn’t something that happens in a vacuum.”

[J.S.A. Lowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surprising number of these "mentor" relationships occurred between young poets who never met their mentors, or knew them only very distantly. This seems...odd to me. The writing is at times compelling, but it's hard to see how they can claim these older writers as mentors in any but the loosest sense of the word (and in the worst case, the younger writer's attention seems almost creepy). I enjoyed it anyway.