E., Somewhere, USA
When is the encouragement of a dream the prolongment of failure? I have a student I have known for many years, and I feel as though intentionally or otherwise our working together persuaded them to pursue a professional path that I fear will yield neither the success they desire currently nor the stability they might want in later years. As a mentor, how do we balance between nourishing and pruning aspirations? When does avoidance of infantilizing someone become shirking of one’s responsibilities?
E.
AW:
E.,
I could be way off on this, but it reads like a mimetic memory ambush, as if you have been thrust into a deadly seriousness required (by you) in your role here as mentor. Remember you are not the sole controller of another’s choices, no matter how influential you have been and perhaps continue to be. Here is “Imaginary Elegy IV” by Jack Spicer, someone who even early in his poetry knew that “people animals things / do what they do today and again tomorrow” in the words of Bernadette Mayer.
Imaginary Elegy IV
Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought
when I wrote that. The dreamers sag a bit,
as if five years had thickened on their flesh
or on my eye. Wafe them with what?
Should I throw rocks at them
to make their naked private bodies bleed?
No. Let them sleep. This much I have learned,
in these five years, and what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
The dummies in the empty funhouse watch
the tides wash in and out. The thick old moon
shines through the rotten timbers every night.
This much is clear, they think, the men who made
Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats
are just as cold as we. The lights are out,
the lights are out.
You’ll smell the oldest smells-
the smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep
before you wake. This much I have learned,
in these five years, and what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
What have I gone to bed with all these years?
What have I taken crying to my bed
for love of me?
Only the shadows of the sun and moon,
their dreaming groins, the creaking images.
Only myself.
Is there some rhetoric
to make me think that I have kept a house
while playing dolls? This much I have learned
in these five years,and what I’ve spent and earned:
that two-eyed monster God is still above.
I saw him once when I was young and once
when I was seized with madness, or was I seized
and mad because I saw him once. He is the sun
and moon made real with eyes.
He is the photograph of everything at once. The love
that makes the blood run cold.
But he is gone, no realer than old
Poetry. This much I have learned
in these five years, and what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
Upon the old amusement pier I’ve watched
creeping darkness gather in the west.
Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts,
I hear the seagulls call. They’re going west,
toward some great Catalina of the dream.
Out where the poem ends.
But does it end?
The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds.
-Jack Spicer
