On mentors
Hercules Segers, The Tomb of the Horatii and Curiatii, ca. 1628-29
When I was 21—this was in 2010—I worked part-time at a theater in U. The place was run by a British actor who was raising his son to take the rein when the father retired. The son was a former child star who screamed lines from Macbeth and suffered violent tantrums when he got stressed. My job was to take care of poets when we had readings: drive them around, make coffee, and keep an eye out for the police whenever the American poets wanted to get high in the yard behind the theater.
I had recently moved to the city from a small town on the Baltic Sea Coast, where I had roamed thirty-mile pine forests, so this was a world that was foreign to me—the eccentricity of it had an electrifying effect on me. I loved meeting people for whom it seemed perfectly normal to travel the world and recite their poems. And they were in fact not unlike me!
Just being in a place where living as a writer was normal changed me.
That fall, we had Niklas Mesaros, a Swedish poet whom I admired, give a reading. When I followed him to the train station afterward, I confessed that I too wrote poetry (I had written four poems, or rather I had about them and had some lines but I had not written them down yet).
“Well, send it to me,” he said.
I friended him on Facebook and typed the poems in the chat. The day after he replied, like any sensible person does when seeing a kid's first attempts at verse, that it was “great, keep going.” It didn’t mean anything, I knew that, but I was grateful, and the next time I visited Stockholm I wrote him.
“I’m in town for the poetry festival this weekend, I wondered if you wanted to have a coffee.”
“Sure,” he wrote and we ended up spending a full day together, ditching the festival, which struck both of us as filled with the type of literature we didn’t want to write. Niklas let me go over the notes for a play he was doing at the Royal Dramatic Theater, a theater that had a certain luster to me since it had been Bergman’s workplace—it felt like I was being pulled into a world of possibility and edge, like a trapdoor was opening. This was far from the pine trees.
After that weekend, I kept traveling down to Stockholm to work on my poems at Niklas’ apartment with increasing frequency. I would think up three, four, five poems a week, long poems that I would read to him, watching the movements in his face at each line, getting a detailed sense of what he felt; it was unlike any education I had ever had. It was an apprenticeship. I watched him as he worked, how he collected his lines in a small notebook which he pulled out on the subway or wherever we were when something we said moved him, I watched how he shuffled the lines around on his kitchen table, heard him talk about why something worked or why it didn’t. He kept nothing hidden for me, it seemed. I tagged along to his readings and saw him perform the same poems again and again—but each time he made it feel like it was the first time these words had happened in the history of the universe, looking down at his notes with a mildly shocked expression as if the words that jumped out of his mouth was a live salmon.
I would sometimes open for him. Then I would always open for him. For two years we were inseparable, his rhythms entering my voice; his friends becoming my friends; travels: first across Sweden to recite and sleep at the couches of other poets, then across the Atlantic to perform along the Eastern seaboard of the US in 2013. I learned more about how to string sentences together during those years than I had in the twenty years prior.