Form means we keep changing our minds, at every velocity, due to life; poetry is that fact’s lucidity.
–Stacy Doris
Stacy Doris led the introductory creative writing class I took as a first-year student at the University of Iowa.
I remember seeing her at the pool, lean and fit in her black one-piece swimsuit. I interpreted the way she moved through the water as confidence.
In winter she wore a hunter’s orange parka that fell past her knees. She stood in front of the class on a particularly cold afternoon, in a black knit dress and stilettos. She said to us, “Please come up for your paper when I call your name. I am wearing these heels and it is hard to walk."
When I heard she had passed away in January at the very young age of 49, I was shocked by the sense of loss I felt even though I had not spoken to her in over twenty years.
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I felt awkward in her class, being the youngest and one of the only black students. One story I wrote about a pregnant woman haunting a married couple was a certain disaster, and the other students’ critique finalized my decision to transfer schools. After class Doris told me I should go to Brown, where she went, which was such flattery that I had to ignore it.
A few years later when I was accepted to a graduate program in creative writing at Brown, I turned it down for another institution I believed to be better suited to my critical interests. But I had a difficult time there and wondered if I had chosen the right place. I thought about her often in those years, though I never tried to reach her.
While she had been my teacher, I admired her—not for her work, which I had not read at the time—but for the kind of woman she seemed to be. I say this though I never made the effort to know her personally. In my mind, she epitomized the kind of “difficult” poet I imagined I could be.
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As I note the irrationality of associating Doris’s person, whom I barely knew, with her work, I recognize how her teaching impacted my becoming a writer and professor of writing.
In recent weeks I have been thinking about all of my teachers of poetry, especially those I did not stay in touch with after my course work with them was completed. Sometimes this disconnection reflected a true mismatch of approaches, and a few teachers made it clear that I was not the kind of student they wanted in their classes. Some of my professors fell ill. Some died. I lost touch with others because I remained intimidated by them, no matter how easy our interactions during class. A few of my teachers became so renowned after I studied with them that I was sure I would be considered a nuisance if I pursued them.
If I noted the names of my teachers of poetry, the gesture would fail to showcase the countless ways they influenced me. I am certain most would not even remember having me as a student, since often I failed to distinguish myself and so much time has passed since I have last seen them.
These ones were significant to me: Gloria Nixon-John, Stacy Doris, Sandra Cisneros, Rei Terada, Ken McClane, A.R. Ammons, Phyllis Janowitz, Robert Morgan, Marilyn Nelson, Elizabeth Alexander, Lucille Clifton, Toi Dericotte, Nikkey Finney, Cornelius Eady, Al Young, Cyrus Cassels, Afaa M. Weaver, Patricia Smith, Kwame Dawes, Yusef Komunyakka, and Carl Phillips.
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To this day, my approach to writing has been shaped by Doris’s pedagogical choices. We read Bruno Bettelheim, who illustrated the importance of fantasy in attempting to make sense of violence and pain. We interrogated the anthropological fictions of Claude Levi-Strauss that demonstrated the impact of misperception. After reading Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse I discovered the use of the word “love” was rarely accurate. I learned no distance exists between cinema and poetry when we watched Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.
Through lessons in phenomenology, literary theory and modernism she taught me to pursue a philosophy of poetry in every act of writing—that every single thing that could be written was a poem.
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Once during the mid-1990s I found a few copies of one of Doris’s books in a small shop in Tribeca. I was a graduate student, and I had gone there to see a concert of improvised trumpet music. The book, the name of which I can’t remember but it must have been Mop Factory Incident because I recall a strange texture to the paper, was a slender volume of difficult poems. I recall thinking I was not yet sophisticated enough to understand them.
A brief biography at the back of the book explained that Doris was living in New York and Paris. I imagined her sweeping down the streets of Montparnasse in heels and that hunter’s orange parka.
I wanted to be bright on the streets of Montparnasse.
I ended up in Amsterdam just a few years later trying to build a performance art company with a number of talented “experimental” musicians and choreographers. Once more, the connection between Doris’ path and my own is not logical, but I do believe that reading that brief biographical note about her life stirred the desire in me to travel. The yearning manifested as some kind of parallel mimicry, likely misinterpreted.
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In the Elizabethan age, fledgling poets wrote sonnets to prove themselves as masters of meter and form. Thus the sonnet came to be associated with the art of youthful ambition. That most of the famous sonnets were written by poets early in their careers—Sidney, Donne, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—suggests that audiences appreciated accounts of longing that somehow seem timeless, or unbound by a consciousness of mortality. Such clear articulations of desire before disappointment can inspire nostalgia for versions of our former selves. Sometimes the form of the poem prevents one from getting to what one is reaching for. The tension that results from this is the hook. For example, consider the way Petrarchian sonnets are often associated with the process of detachment in the pursuit of a love that cannot be won. And it is the nature of the prose poem to point to a place or state of being that could never exist.
An elegy attempts to negate the public denial of grief, a symbolic action that attempts to turn that grief into joy. It may address multiple audiences. There is no requirement that the elegy be entirely accurate as it is the expression of private thoughts.
In fact, the thoughts may be altogether wrong.
When I teach creative writing, I encourage my students to focus on the task of illuminating contradiction. This is not the only work a poem can do nor even its best, but as an exercise, writing away from resolution can make unexpected connections that demonstrate the action of poetry at its most elastic.
It has been argued that a poem is also a farewell to the poet who wrote it, one who no longer exists once she finished with the work. Perhaps this explains why so much poetry that is venerated through canon or curriculum is the work of a young person, most often a young man, insisting on his existence.
In representing a speaker, the poem attempts to define a hypothetical beloved who due to the unavoidability of misperception cannot possibly exist as written.
I remember Stacy Doris.
Wendy S. Walters is a co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading
Series in Harlem, NY. Her most recent book of poems is Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (Palm Press). She is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, HOW2, and Seneca Review, among several others. She has been a nominee for the Essay Prize and her prose has been published or is forthcoming in Bookforum, The Iowa Review, Coldfront, Seneca Review, Seattle Review, and Harper’s Magazine.
Series in Harlem, NY. Her most recent book of poems is Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (Palm Press). She is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, HOW2, and Seneca Review, among several others. She has been a nominee for the Essay Prize and her prose has been published or is forthcoming in Bookforum, The Iowa Review, Coldfront, Seneca Review, Seattle Review, and Harper’s Magazine.
