According to Sam Mock’s early 2010s Twitter, “laundry was invented to keep mankind from getting too far ahead of itself” and his “spirit animal is that one remote control that only works the volume.” Mock’s profile picture—a black and white sketch of his face—and two of his six-year-old tweets are splayed on the front of a five poem packet given to twelfth grade students enrolled in the Poetry elective taught by Upper School English teacher Matthew Laufer. 

“A lot of how I teach poetry was in some way from him or kind of shaped by him,” Laufer said about Mock’s poetry. “He was a really good mix of very cerebral, very imaginative, very intelligent but also super down to Earth. I wanted to kind of emulate that in how I would teach a topic.” 

Mock, who joined the Upper School English team during the 2014-2015 academic year as a year-long replacement for a teacher on medical leave and served as a Middle School basketball coach during the same year, spoke to the senior Poetry elective on December 12. 

During his discussion, Mock gave advice about writing poetry and insight into his own poems, like “Summer Shadow Lamina,” “Lodestar,” and “Lake Aster.”

According to Mock, he writes about “grappling with existence. Grappling with being in a body—being in a being. Metaphysical, existential, all that.”

Mock claims that his fascination with poetry first arose as a seventh grader in Washington, D.C. At the time, Mock was transitioning between middle schools, and, noticing his proclivities toward the humanities, Mock’s English teacher took him under her wing. 

Mock continued his passion with writing. In 2005, he received a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia and matriculated immediately to the University of Michigan in 2005, where he completed his MFA in creative writing and poetry in 2007. 

“The main reason why people go get a masters in fine arts and writing is to just have the time to write,” Mock said. “It’s just two full years where all you’re asked to do it write, and that’s a really difficult thing to get done in the real world.”

Although Mock had worked at two other private schools prior to 2014 with similar missions and demographics, he reflected upon Parker as having a greater sense of community and family. “The ‘model home’ is the phrase that still sticks with me even now,” Mock said. “Kind of hard to shake that.”

The Poetry elective reads works from the collections of more than seven esteemed poets, including Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and Kevin Young. To prep for Mock’s visit, the 15 students in Poetry read five of his poems and analyzed them in class. 

“Even though he’s the youngest among the living contemporary poets that I teach,” Laufer said about Mock, “I think, in some ways, he fits more with the more traditional poets that I teach. I think he’s less political, and, in a way, less sociological.”

“His poems were really, really good,” senior Alex Nikolaev said, “but I didn’t appreciate them as much until he actually came in and told us about his own experience of writing and pretty much how hard it really is, and it doesn’t come easy to anyone. I’m struggling. He’s also struggling. Writers aren’t alone, and they’re all going through similar things.”

When talking about his own writing process, Mock said he remains creative by “keeping my eyes open and my brain moving throughout the day and having a way to jot something down if something strikes me. I tend not to just sit down in a dark room and think hard. Things usually come organically over the days.”

“A big point that he had, for me, was start thinking in metaphors as much as possible,” Nikolaev said, “and that can give more meaning to the world around you and your poems. He said was that poetry is not an approximation, but it’s pretty exact, so don’t settle for a bad word.”

“I find it highly image-based and deeply committed to metaphor,” Laufer said when describing Mock’s poetic style. “It is what he says about his own poetry and I find it to be vividly true myself. I think his style reflects that. He’s trying to take you from a sort of familiar place and kind of wrench you out of that place by means of really vivid and often really startling images.”

When asked about the future of his work and its legacy, Mock doesn’t have any grand plans. “I think it’s just one other example in the cacophony of the human experience,” Mock said. “It’s just one more voice—it’s just one more person bearing witness.”