How do you write about the person who showed you how to be an artist? To trust and distrust the language I was making? To reach into the heart of the animal?
I keep the notebooks in my closet, an archive of notes from my teacher, mentor, and friend, poet Dorianne Laux. This is where I can visit my teachers even when they are on the other side of the country. The notebook, the portal, where language lives in the past and the now, building the connective tissue of my poetic lineage.
My notebooks are full of craft lecture notes, book suggestions, poet suggestions, words, lines, and writing prompts from Dorianne since 2013, when I first met her at a workshop with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, hosted by Raleigh Review, a magazine created by Rob Greene, also a student of Dorianne’s. Years of courses with Dorianne, as an undergraduate and graduate MFA poetry student at North Carolina State University, have provided me with notebooks full of quotes like “The poem knows something you do not” and “Poems can be lit by images.” Such quotes have guided me through three books of poems and all the poems in between those books.
I found lines from poets Dorianne introduced us to in class, lines by Ruth Stone like “no easy water” and “an academy of trees.” There were notes on the first poem Dorianne introduced us to in Introduction to Poetry, “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, that discussed what is made possible in making complete lines. She introduced me to the work of Lucille Clifton and Sharon Olds, and when Sharon Olds came to read at NC State, she introduced me to Sharon Olds in person.
She taught me to be a poet in the world, to pay attention to what’s around me, and to make meaning of what I encounter. Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine, on January 10, 1952. She is a poet full of experiences that create worlds within ours, where what makes us human is broken open and made song. Those experiences came from her work as a gas clerk, station manager, cook, and maid, and through time in Juneau, Alaska, and San Diego and Los Angeles, California. In the eighties, Dorianne settled in Berkeley, California. As a student at Mills College, she edited the college’s magazine, The Walrus. She started her first teaching positions in 1992 at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Early in her writing, Dorianne was interested in the “heroism in the ordinary.” Her first collection, Awake, was published in 1990 with an introduction by her teacher, Philip Levine, another poet of experience.