2 posts tagged “carolyn”
In honor of World Teachers' Day today, tell us about a teacher who had a positive impact on your life.
John Abram Bubb, d. 1993, sculptor in stone, dearly remembered: the coolest art teacher who ever was.
Sister Patricia Binko, the Nun of Suzuki Strings. I play the violin because of her.
Bruce Weigl, poet, critic, essayist, memoirist, translator, and fucking cool guy. I had his English 213, Intro to Poetry Writing, pretty much by accident -- it fit my schedule that fall. I thought, "Oh, poetry. That should be easy" -- words which haunted me as I sat down to write my 4-hour master's-degree candidacy exam in 1997.
Carolyn Forche. My guru. I love Carolyn forever.
Peter Klappert. Peter is another poet under whose grad-school strictures I blossomed.
Chris Thaiss was the first instructor to teach me how to teach, way back in the TA days. Now, everybody I work with teaches me more about all that.
Show us someone who inspires you.
Right, since I've already put in Bruce, this seems like a perfectly opportune time to introduce Carolyn. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome poet, translator, and teacher Carolyn Forché.
If Bruce Weigl, to whom I referred a few entries back, is the godfather or spirit-father of my poems, Carolyn is their godmother. I first met her in January 1993, when she was visiting professor at Penn State. I knew her work, and I knew how much my mother was into her (she'd seen her years before at a writers' conference at the University of North Dakota), so I was quite interested in working with her. She was teaching a graduate seminar, no undergrad classes, but Bruce, then head of the creative writing program, had confidence in the quality of my work and signed the permission slip that admitted a mere undergrad to Carolyn's class. That was when I started using gold-tone paperclips because Carolyn did. The Grateful Dead-derived expression "What a long, strange trip it's been" starts to apply here.
Speaking of "apply," not eighteen months later, I would find myself enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program in poetry at George Mason University in Virginia, with Carolyn as my thesis advisor. I have a great many Carolyn stories, some of which would no doubt mortify her; I can say that there were times I feared she hung around with me mainly because I could only ever finish about half a glass of white wine, so that when we each had a glass, she would end up drinking a glass and a half to my half-glass. The picture above was taken in the office-studio she had while I was her student, and which I deeply envied: the bookcases behind her were built directly into the wall, for example. More, it just felt like -- this is about to sound very silly -- a holy place, a place full of seriousness of purpose, of study and of making-it-new (cf. Ezra Pound). Part of that, of course, was that on a bookstand, she had this ginormous Russian Orthodox Bible open to some random page of Cyrillic, and closer to the desk there was a small, framed picture of her guru, Kalu Rinpoche.
I write to Carolyn (who now teaches at Skidmore College in New York State), but I miss having her around. You read all this deeply serious stuff about poetry of witness and genocide and El Salvador, and none of it would give you a clue that she's just fun to hang out with. Part of what continues to inspire me about her is that she's from my same general ethnic background, Slavic (I'm mostly Polish), and social class (my grandfathers were solidly prole, my parents each the first generation in their families to go to college), and she's just a model of how a woman makes a life in poetry.
*stops gushing now*
