Annie Finch on women poets & mentorship

Annie Finch, blogging at Harriet, asks some telling questions about the presence of mentors in the lives of women poets:

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.

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?

For most of my life, I was pretty-much a mentor-less woman poet. The men to whom I looked for guidance were particularly discouraging about my efforts to write poetry. Mostly they suggested that I’d be better off to go into office work. But, as Finch points out here, I also made the mistake of thinking the male poets of the canon were the models of what a poet should be.

It was only as I got older and started to look toward other women for xxxx that I began to find those who understood what I was trying to say, who encouraged and taught me. Among those I would thank are Leatha Kendrick, the women of Green River Writers, and the women of Mosaic.

A meme currently making the rounds on Facebook asks one to list the “20 poetry books (if there are twenty) that made you fall in love with poetry, the books that made you think: I want to do this, I need to do this. What are the books that kept you going?”

Interesting to see whether women name women. I think that I would not name many because my formative years when “poetesses” like Browning and Dickinson were only grudgingly allowed anywhere near the canon.

Go read Annie Finch.