“I ask my father about love,” former Upper School English teacher Sam Mock writes in his poem “Summer Shadow Lamina.” “He says it’s like when magnets aren’t meant to touch, the air turns into jelly, seduced into a body.”

On Wednesday, May 16, Upper School English teacher Matt Laufer’s Poetry class felt more like a reunion than a typical lesson. Mock, who taught members of the class of 2018, among others, during their freshman year while Upper School English teacher Bonnie Seebold was on leave, returned to share poetry advice.

Seated amidst the piles of papers and books cluttering the large classroom table, Mock occasionally looked up from answering questions to the small glass window of the classroom door to find former students waving at him.

Prior to his visit, the 17 students in the class were assigned three poems by Mock to read. “I thought it was cool reading someone very contemporary, as in he’s still alive and writing right now,” senior Isobel Bender said. “I found it very lyrical and modern, and it was unique.”

Not unlike many of the students in the class, Mock first discovered poetry in middle school. “From there in college,” Mock said, “I fell into a work program at UVA with some wonderful poets there.”After attending UVA, Mock earned his Master in Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Michigan. Currently Mock works at AHEAD, a consulting company in the Chicagoland area, as a Marketing Manager.

“At the end of those two years, you’re supposed to have basically a book length work ready to publish or send out,” Mock said in reference to his graduate program. “A lot of people on the fiction side, that’s the money makers–the people on the fiction side actually get their books turned into movies. Poets don’t get movies made out of our works. But I continued to write, and I’ve gotten some of my works published. The works you all read today have been published.”

Through all the writing Mock was assigned as part of his MFA, he learned how he worked best as a poet. “Deadlines help,” Mock said, cautioning that relying on the same patterns can be problematic. “It’s dangerous, it’s a slippery slope–you get to a point where you think, ‘Oh, there can’t be any other way,’ and you don’t want that.”

Writers can get themselves into ruts, but Mock believes there is a way out. “You eventually get out of that, and you find other paths or things, other questions,” he said. “Of course the first draft of that will be abismal because you’re blind to tone, you’re not familiar with this stuff.” Even now, after years of practice, Mock still feels like his best work only begins to emerge after sitting down to focus for an hour or two.  

Just like with finding the time or place that a poet feels most comfortable writing in, different types of poems also become more familiar to work with. Mock tries writes poems from a perspective other than his own. “As I wrote more and more,” Mock said, “there’s a direct correlation with the more I write, the more I write from different perspectives.”

For students in the Poetry class, this task of writing from a lens other than a personal one can be difficult. “I feel like I’m lying when I write from another perspective and don’t necessarily specify or tell the reader,” senior Margo Fuchs said. “It’s like maybe you should write what you know.  Otherwise it feels less authentic.”

As a middle ground, Mock suggested writing with a mix. “Yes, it’s from my perspective, but there are then creative liberties, and this is maybe another whole other class period, but sometimes things that are truer than truth in literature,” Mock said, speaking specifically about his “Summer Shadow Lamina,” a piece about a flood, the destruction that follows, and a relationship with his father.  “I borrow and sort of peddle in that business.” While some of the poem is based in truth, Mock said, much of it isn’t. For example: in it the speaker mentions having a brother, and Mock doesn’t have a brother.

Mock also presented a work in progress–a poem from the perspective of Vincent Van Gogh’s brother, Theo Van Gogh, who went progressively more insane after the death of his brother up until he was institutionalized. The siblings wrote letters back and forth to each other, and Mock decided to try to capture the story of these letters in verse.

“It’s really interesting to me because it’s such a prominent figure that has someone that was that close to him that has something equally as dramatic, more heartbreaking,” Mock said. “I’m trying to shed a light on it. But also explore those other themes.”

In the Poetry class, students often grappled with the significance of poetry as a genre. “Are you ever writing or reading poetry and think, ‘This is just bullshit?’” senior Maya Sanghvi asked. “You know, when you read poetry, and people are just making these grand big points about life and love and whatever, and it just feels so overbearing? Maybe just fake?”

Mock was familiar with the sensation. “I personally don’t connect as much to poetry that fixes itself as an answer,” he said. “The fuel that I use to write poetry is questions, but I’m not writing poetry to answer those questions.  I’m writing to open them up wider, to expand them, to pose them to new lenses and to try and add new layers. I also think those are the really more interesting ones. If something is posing itself as the answer, and ‘This is the way this is,’ I don’t know if you have as much to discuss.”

To avoid what Mock refers to as “a poem that feels like it’s important or a poem that supposedly has the answers,” he relies on avoiding trying to meet a need regarding what his poems should sound like. “You’re trying to sound a certain way,” he said. “I still have poems like that when I go back, and and I read stuff I wrote in graduate school, and that’s there. I was really trying to have this voice that I thought I needed to sound like. Sometimes the best thing to do is to, for a moment, don’t read anything. Just cleanse the pallet.”

Mock referred back to “Summer Shadow Lamina” once more, specifically the form of the poem. “That’s why ‘Summer Shadow Lamina’ was written in a ton of prose,” Mock said. “I cleansed my poetic pallet because I was like, ‘My tone sucks. It sounds inauthentic. It sounds like I’m trying to sound like someone else.’ I needed to cleanse my palate, and this new tone came out.”

As the end of E-period was marked with the sound of music, most students stuffed papers back in their bags and continued on their way. Bender stayed back to continue the conversation with Mock. “I loved when he came and presented to the class,” Bender later said. “I thought it was really cool to hear from someone who takes their art or their profession seriously, and I think sometimes as poetry students we get a little distanced from the deep poetic art. It’s just cool to hear him talk really beautifully about what he does.”

Hearing Mock was interesting not only in the moment for Bender. “I took notes, and I still look at those notes if I need inspiration,” Bender said. “I would have loved if we talked to more poets because I thought it was that useful.”