Poetry and long skirts: a tribute to Laura Boss
It’s hard for me to think of Laura Boss as a teacher in a traditional sense, though she is one. To me, she is more like poetry incarnate. I remember, more than 30 years ago, being 17 years old and watching her enter my stuffy private school classroom as a visiting poet. All skirts and jewelry and hair, she was a middle-aged woman who dressed as I did bohemian, offbeat, flowing, and comfortable in her own skin. She talked to us about poetry, read us poems from her books, and invited us to visit her during office hours to share our writing and get feedback. I brought her a poem I’d written while on a visit to look at colleges. It was my best work, rife with biblical references that might have bothered my rabbi or hers, if she’d had a rabbi. She didn’t, and she liked the poem. Surprisingly, she offered to publish it in her real-life, grown-up literary journal, Lips. Not only that, but she phrased it something like this: “I am going to be the first to publish you.” Who does that? Who looks at a 17-year-old and thinks “She is going to be a poet, and I’m going to help her do it?” She then, right on the spot, invited me to be her intern at her magazine. I immediately accepted. I did not ask her for any of these things. She just took a liking to me and offered. I don’t think I’m the only young poet Laura did this for.
Laura’s mother made us grilled cheese sandwiches, or we’d take some of the poems to a nearby diner and order sandwiches there while we worked in a booth by the window. Laura trusted me to open a few envelopes and do the first read, but mostly she read and I hand-wrote the rejection letters for her. There was a basic form and shape to the rejection letters, but if there was something she liked about a poem she would dictate extra lines. It was important to her to make personal connections, to acknowledge what was beautiful or touching or interesting even if it did not make the cut for the magazine.
In between, we would talk about poetry and about our lives. I learned that she had become a poet—a professional poet—in middle age, after raising two sons and leaving a marriage of 20 years. This astounded me and changed the way I viewed careers, aging, and choices. There I was, about to graduate high school, being pressured at every turn to decide what I wanted to study, what I wanted to “do.” Laura was a living, breathing lesson that life is not made of rigid paths with walls around them. She taught me life is malleable, life is in the present tense, and we can change what we are doing at any time. We can become who we are at any age. This, perhaps even more than the poetry, is how Laura most affected my life.
Our bond never faltered, even when I went on to college and moved into adulthood. Laura had taken me on as a mentee, and she never abandoned her role as my mentor. She visited me at college, sitting down to dinner at long co-op tables surrounded by 20- and 21-year-olds and taking it all in. She gossiped with me about boys, looked at drafts of new poems, and ate our hippie vegan cooking. And she kept publishing me. She always wanted to see my best work, and always took something for her next issue. She kept telling me to apply for the Yale Younger Poets award before I turned 40. She understood and respected the soulmate bond I had with Shire, my elderly disabled horse, around whom I organized my life. Laura was over 30 years my senior, the same age as my parents, but somehow bridged being both mentor and friend, someone I could confide in as well as learn from.
When I needed a poet for an event I was putting together for the campus Women’s Center, she signed right up and her reading was the bright spot for everyone who attended. Even though the theme was Women’s Spirituality, a topic that was not her focus (spirituality that is—women were certainly a focus of her writing). “How did you get that great poet?” other young women asked me. How to even explain?
Laura and I saw each other sporadically over the decade I lived in Massachusetts, where I went to law school and became a legal aid lawyer. We talked about my work, her teaching, the things and people occupying our minds. She was concerned by the toll that law school and the stress of legal aid work took on me. She encouraged me to keep writing. I did.
When I returned to New Jersey, I visited her more often, and I started attending weekend-long workshops she gave twice a year with Maria Mazziotti Gillan at a convent near my house. The workshops were legendary, half writing and half therapy, as she taught poets how to access and write about the difficult things inside of us, how to compress past trauma and present confusion into gems made out of words. How to listen to each other. How to critique without criticizing. How to support each other. When we’d come back to the table after an open writing period, she’d listen to every poem with utmost attention, taking notes in her journal, asking to hear specific lines again, zeroing in on the heart of the poem, as well as the parts that were there only for deflection and did not serve us or our work. She always read last, always started by saying “This really isn’t anything, but I’ll read you what I have” and then left us laughing, crying, or open-mouthed at the witty and irreverent lines she’d come up with in response to the prompt.
Laura has taught for four decades. She’s taught in middle schools and high schools, in stuffy private schools like mine, and in public schools with limited resources and students from low-income households. She’s helped all the teenagers find the poetry in their own lives, looking for the kids with poets’ hearts and offering her hand, offering publication, offering mentorship. She’s taught workshops for mature adults—people over 50, who I thought of as seniors until recently. Now that I’m about to turn 50 myself, they just seem like older versions of teenagers to me, and I think that’s how Laura sees them as well. She’s taught beginner and master classes. She’s sponsored readings by other poets, as well as giving countless readings herself.
I am still learning from Laura, even as she winds down her formal teaching. At 49, I have the gumption to try to transition into a writing career smack in the midst of middle age only because I have her as a model. Only because she showed me, starting when I was a girl, that it’s possible to change course mid-life and become more who you are. That you can be at 50 who you were not able to be at 20 or even at 30. That it doesn’t make sense to decide it’s too late, to stay in situations that aren’t working, to give up on oneself or one’s art. That a life in poetry, in any kind of writing, is financially difficult, but that poetry is its own sort of food, that writing is how some of us save our own lives. As I stretch more into my own creativity, it is only because of Laura, because of what she’s taught me, but even more because of what she’s shown me.
I’ve been sick for the last five years and Laura has never failed to express concern for my well-being, even as her own has started slipping away. She checks on me when I should be checking on her. I took up guitar and songwriting at 48, and she’s been my biggest fan, listening to every song, reminding me to keep playing, and expressing her hope that I’m still enjoying it. When I started writing a novel, she was the only person I told. I wasn’t even sure it counted as a novel until Laura read what I’d written and encouraged me to keep going. She was the first to read the full draft. She stayed up half the night reading it on her iPad and wrote me back the next day.
How can one express the gift of having a teacher like this? The exceptional luck of finding such a mentor, of having them with you through teenage years, first loves, marriage and children, through career changes and illnesses, through aging?
Yesterday I watched one of the Star Wars films with my ten-year-old. Looking back on my life with Laura as a mentor, it is hard not to think of her as my Obi-Wan Kenobi, finding me as a teenager in a creative desert, showing me the Force as we both understood it, guiding me at every twist and turn of my adventure. And just as Obi-Wan remains with Luke Skywalker always, separated not even by death, I know that Laura will be with me always, not only her wisdom and words, not only her encouragement and her example, but also her love. Her love of poetry, her love of art, and her love for me. There is no greater impact that a teacher can have.
Addendum: Laura Boss passed away on Friday, April 9. She was able to read this tribute a few weeks before her death. And she imparted, by example, one final lesson. Laura approached her impending death as she approached her life– with grace, strength, and independence. She was not afraid. And in true Laura fashion, at the point at which she was too weak to phone or email, she asked her son to record her saying goodbye to me and send it after her death. Laura’s last message was not only that she loved me, but also that she was grateful for my place in her life. Such was the generosity of her spirit, that this is what she said after all she did for me through the decades.
Michelle Lerner
This essay first appeared in Waywords
Links
Matching Urns by Laura Boss
I think how three weeks before surgery I thought (as I cleaned my apartment in case I didn’t make it so my mother wouldn’t have a stroke when she first saw my place) how one of the first things my first husband’s second wife did after their marriage was to get two places in a mausoleum so they would be “together forever”(though in the traditional Jewish religion I’m still married to him since we never had a Jewish divorce—just the usual civil one) And I think how I don’t have a place to be buried— no plot way out in Long Island by my grandparents— No plot nearer in Queens where my father and his parents and his sisters are buried with only room left for my mother What a pain for my kids at the time of grieving to have to find some plot of dirt to dig me into— How civilized if I am cremated and save them the time and effort as well as cemetery trip— lights on all the cars way out to Long Island but the air conditioners probably off since the cars are overheating from the ten-mile an hour funeral procession—No, perhaps a plot closer to their apartments –but then so costly for them— Yes, better and cheaper to be burnt up and my ashes given to them in a tasteful urn in brown clay— or perhaps pink enamel with little rosebuds with daisies if they want to spring for it— to be placed on a mantel But whose mantel Will my sons fight over who will get my ashes— Will the fight be over who has to keep this depressing urn on their mantel ( neither has a mantel)— And how will their wives feel to have their mother-in-law forever parked in their living room seeing the dust or unvacuumed floors, a constant recrimination to them—though she was never a housekeeper— And perhaps my lover of ten years will want the urn— After all, he is such a collector of cardboard boxes that his VCR or an electric fan came in— Will my ashes be fought over— Will they third me up So that one might have the ashes of my legs with their slight varicose veins—or my head— or breasts— My younger son who kept his bottle until he was five probably would get my breasts No, I see my lover with these— He always admired them— Now he can have their ashes— buy me a pretty black bra from Victoria’s Secret catalogue and throw it in—take out the bra when he yearns for me— No, the ashes on the bra would mess up his place and he hates all dust with a passion— No, I see him taking my ashes –to the relief of both my sons—and especially their wives— I see him putting my ashes in a matching urn that he selected so carefully for his cat Kate— I see our twin urns on his mantel— My fate to be there next to this cat I was so allergic to in life—seeing some new lover of his in a jealous fit after he tearfully tells her how much he loved me after making love to her, this new lover spitefully moving these two urns on the bedroom mantel so that he is actually talking to the cat when he remembers me— and tenderly pats her urn and calls her Laura
from ARMS: New and Selected Poems
It’s ok (Laura’s sea shanty), in memoriam for Laura Boss
Performed by Michelle Lerner.