Mentoring and the Female Poet’s Voice

Female poets in the twentieth century faced well-documented challenges in finding a place in the masculine hegemony of modernist poetic values and practice. Their strategies for seizing the culturally sanctioned role of “poet” were often subversive—as William Drake, Cheryl Walker, and others have shown—or compulsively self-protective. Marianne Moore’s armored animals, Elinor Wylie’s “masks outrageous and austere” (65), Louise Bogan’s prescriptive obscurity, and Elizabeth Bishop’s famous reticence all seemed necessary to avoid the damning and oft-deployed charge of “writing like a woman.” Even in the years following the Second World War, retrenchment and conservatism in the culture at large sparked a forceful—if temporary—resurgence of modernist values in poetry that severely challenged young female poets in their search for credible poetic voice. Alicia Ostriker, in Stealing the Language (1986), chronicled the “quest for identity” that was the first task of the female poet coming of age in a culture “external and internal, which opposes female autonomy” (59).

One reason each generation of female poets seemed to struggle anew with finding an authoritative voice is that the culture had done so much to obscure the tradition of poetry by women that preceded them. The twentieth century forcefully dismissed and then forgot the “poetesses” who dominated popular poetry in the nineteenth century, and the generation of female modernist poets was generally loath to claim those ancestors, or to identify in solidarity with one another. The following generations, with notable exceptions, found the female poets accepted into the modernist canon—Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein—too idiosyncratic to claim. This absence of role models and mentors is the occasion for Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker’s collection of essays by contemporary female poets honoring their female mentors, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (2008).

Elizabeth Bishop was one of the exceptions, and described her first encounter with the poetry of her eventual mentor and friend, Marianne Moore, with amazement: “I hadn’t known poetry could be like that” (qtd. in Greenberg and Zucker xiii). The younger female poets included in the Greenberg and Zucker collection of appreciations nearly all reveal some similar moment of empowering revelation. (Of course, the “like that” that Bishop appreciated in Moore in 1934 had evolved by 1980 or so to include subject matter—the intimate experience of female bodies in particular—entirely sublimated in Moore and present in Bishop only in unpublished poems.) Over and over the poets describe finding the opening of possibility in the work of an older female poet, “permission to write about the impermissible” (xvi)—often a chance to join the identities of “lesbian” and “poet” in one voice or consciousness, or permission to speak from a cultural margin with the force of one’s own experience. Valerie Martínez’s essay on Joy Harjo is typical: “There was something frighteningly beautiful and personal about Harjo’s work, as if I had entered an identity I had unconsciously left behind” (100). And when the younger poet comes to meet and know the older poet whose work has been so important, the example of how to be a poet is often empowering as well. As Bishop saw in Moore an example of personal modesty and consistent hard work, Erika Meitner says of Rita Dove, “She taught me that writing and living are the same thing” (117).

Women Poets and Mentorship prompted a lively online discussion last year, following a blog post by Annie Finch, poet and founder of the “Women Poets Listserve” (WomPo), praising the book and speculating about the absence of mentoring relationships in the history of women’s poetry. Says Finch, “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...