Years ago, one of my first would-be mentors told me that he was never writing again. That the sum total of rejection, the pressure to keep sending work out and revision fatigue was keeping him from the very academic scholarship he wanted to produce.Getting his Ph.D at a well-known university, he nonetheless envied those who’d secured tenure-track jobs and then book deals with respectable presses, who had won awards and garnered whatever public fame could be achieved by an academic outside the creative field. He’d started out with such promise, and didn’t know what happened to himself, to his ambition. The conversation eventually led to a question he’d begun to ask: what was important—writing or security?
Only he wasn’t asking for himself.
He was asking me— as he pointed out— an undergraduate scholarship student who had nothing to fall back on, no financial support, no parents with college degrees, no family connections. He urged me to give up writing— the same man who a week before had asked to see my poems. He’d seen me in the shared graduate student office talking to a young poet pursuing her MFA; her introductory creative writing class had changed my life. I remember he’d poke his head in from time to time, and make small talk with us. He asked me a lot of questions, and the poet would allow these seemingly polite intrusions, although he’d never ran a creative writing workshop, much less a poetry workshop. Nonetheless one day he wrote me an email, asking if he could see my work to see “where I was at.” I was so flattered that he’d taken an interested that I didn’t see the hidden language in such a request.
And I didn’t expect that when I went to meet him for coffee, that he would read my poems right in front of me. I’d expected that he’d take them home, and that we might discuss other things. I took my seat, and he asked for the poems and read them straightaway. At one point he looked up at me— and I’ll never forget this— and said, “Do you read French? Or German?”
I shook my head.
He squinted slightly and said, “You should. These are languages you should know.”
In all earnest, I replied: “Do you?”
He furrowed his brow. “No, but I’m not trying to be a poet. And– this. I keep seeing this word a lot. What’s this word?”
I looked at the word in question.
“It’s pronounced derech.”
“What language is that?”
“Hebrew.”
He smiled. “Oh, that’s a useful one.”
About ten minutes passed. Not long enough for anyone to give a thorough reading of twentysomething pages of work, but long enough that I began to get antsy, watching the steam rise from his coffee until it disappeared altogether. The cup sat untouched, although he stirred it from time to time. Stirred his coffee without cream or sugar. I sipped mine and waited, staring out the window and envying those passers-by, those not chained to this moment, this painfully awkward moment in which I sensed that I should be armoring up, but all I could do was sit there, until he let out a sigh, a signal. He stacked my pages together and told me he had been working on his dissertation for several years, hoping to turn it into a book, only to see another in his field publish one akin to his idea. He had tried to move on and just finish his work, but couldn’t. Time was running out. He’d begun with such promise: did I understand? Eventually he envisioned that he’d be let go from his teaching gig, wouldn’t achieve a tenure-track job and respect and acclaim. He seemed to be so on the edge of despair that I forgot originally why I’d come to meet him. He promised me that he really knew what he was talking about: that, already in mid-thirties, his well-off family was still helping him pay for “a certain kind of lifestyle” so he could achieve a dream that he probably never would. He had security for life, he said, and he was giving up writing anyway, and as for me– someone like me– my aspirations as a poet were like “staking my life on a needle in the haystack.”
While I pondered this now unforgettable and odd-troped observation, he arose from his seat, and downed his cold cup of coffee. Wiping his mouth, he suggested that I go into pharmacy school, or nursing, as those kind of jobs are plentiful and always in demand.
Then, just as oddly as the meeting had began, he squeezed my shoulder and said: “Happy holidays. See you in the spring.”
I did see him in the spring, although I tried to avoid running into him. We never spoke to each other again. I went on to win both the undergraduate awards that were given in poetry and fiction. I never became fluent in French or German. He eventually published his work. He never stopped writing; perhaps telling me to stop writing had given him a twisted revitalization. Perhaps he had done this before. Perhaps he did it long after me, until he received his doctorate and left the university.
All things considered, what has really stuck with me over the years is not that we never discussed the poems— it’s that he never asked for the meaning of any of words he didn’t know. Particularly the word derech, which was the nucleus of those particular poems. It means “road” or “way of life,” and much more— for example, it’s used in Tefilat HaDerech, which is a prayer recited for safe journeys. I kept such a prayer printed on a small, laminated paper hamsa in my wallet. It was the one word that would have answered the question that he had been asking me. If he’d really been asking at all.
Those poems now have filtered into other poems, joined other longer sequences, some of the verse even escaping into prose. Like here. Like now. And I’m still returning to those first poems, and finding homes for entire stanzas and singles words. I remain open to the patience in doing so, although it took me time to turn off the white noises that add nothing to the journey itself. Such are those who seek to discourage you. Such as those who are incapable of the very journeys that you had no choice but to stake your life on.