Mentor Statement: Carol Potter - poetry As a teacher, I first look for what you do best; locate the strength in the poem, the heart and lungs and legs of the poem, and if it seems hobbled, I will make suggestions about possible ways in which to free it.  We will work towards mastering craft, and then going beyond it--accessing  as Ed Hirsh calls it “duende”, the raw, the ragged. Craft must be learned,but without heart, soul,  and shadow all is lost. I believe there is an absolute bottom line, a real difference between mediocre and superb, good and bad.  Either the cup holds water, or it doesn’t.  Either the bicycle has wheels, or it hasn’t.   Ergo, craft has to be learned, but it is not all.  There are many wonderful, skilled poets in the world yet far too many banal poems. Beautiful packages, but nothing inside them.  My goal is to help students find the best way to craft the poem, but even more, to access the raw material, to allow the wild in the poem, to make surprises, but not with gimmicks. Hence, no gimmicks, many surprises. How to find them?  I encourage associative building of the poems; to allow the unexpected to happen.  Some workshop exercises are possibly in store, depending on student inclinations, depending on how much and where it seems necessary to shake the collective’s sensibilities.  I will also suggest readings of specific poets, and journals that will offer other ways to approach the material. How to do this?   Planned surprises, found poems, exercises in workshop to see  just what the first impulse might be for each student. Sometimes we need to be rocketed out of our own habits, and try new approaches.   Revision--  I encourage flexibility, new vision for the poem when necessary, and re-vision, revision. Sometimes it’s important to come back to the poem from another direction, in another person, another day.  Put the poem away.  Sometimes leave the material for another time. I encourage students to disown their own poems when revising.  We have to be able to see the work with a cool, level eye and to edit our own work as if we were strangers to it.   One must let go of what one meant to say, and allow the poem to take its own life.  We do this in dreams.  One image hooks onto another. It is the truth of these linkages that persuades me.  I encourage students to trust this. To trust their own footsteps; and let the poem happen. I believe there are only a few stories: love, loss, death, rebirth, and the stories have been told.  Hence it is not the story, but how it is told, sung, spun. The sound of the poem is of utmost importance.  We need the music of words, the delight of sound.  I like poems that spring, that are wound tight, that click one line into the next with the surety of a bike derailleur in good tune. I expect the poem to lift my scalp, to make me feel, as Dickinson said, as if the top of my head were lifted.  I want to be riveted, to be scared, happy, to feel something, and most of all to be in the presence of the mystery at the heart of the poem. No mystery.   No magic. No poem. I want the poems to want to be written, to need to be written, and that the poem be allowed to take on its own life.  I am not in favor of agendas, Anybody’s Rules of Order, or any sort of preconceived notion about where the poem ought to go. I encourage as Keats says, “negative capability.”  The space between the words, the blank on the canvass, the red inside the red. I want the poem to speak to me, but not lecture.  I want the poem to instruct me, but not in anything I can use.  I want the poem to need to be written, and to have its own need. Each person comes with his or her own sensibilities, and each poem bears the thumb print of the individual.  I respect the individual style, inclination, drive of each poet. My own inclinations are toward conciseness, compression, humor, oddity, sharpness, and as David Walker says, “daffy logic” and “the spirit of attentiveness to the world’s variety”  —however that is achieved.  I am open to any form, any style.   The goal is great poems, great exploration, great triumphs, great disappointments, and great hopes for the next poem.  Be prepared to take chances, to ask questions, to be baffled, to get stuck, and to enjoy whatever problems arise as they are often the stuff of the next great work.  This is an open dialogue with me, with yourselves, with each other.