Lamont Poet: Gail Mazur

Gail Mazur, the fall 2016 Lamont Poet, shared her poetry with the Exeter community at a reading Wednesday evening. She also led a question-and-answer session on Thursday morning and worked individually with students in English classes later in the day. Supplementing her formidable work as a poet, Mazur has worked as both educator and activist over the years, serving as the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston. She founded the Blacksmith House Poetry Series with her late husband, Michael, who was a visual artist until his death in 2009. The two also co-founded Artists Against Racism and the War in 1968, and later advocated for a nuclear freeze.

Mazur has published seven books of poetry, including “Figures in a Landscape” and “Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poetry,” as well as “Nightfire, The Post of Happiness,” “The Common” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” She has received such notable honors as the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award and the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award, and she was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Time Book Prize and the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Leading up to Mazur’s reading on Wednesday, several English classes read selections from “Forbidden City,” her most recent anthology of poems, which the University of Chicago Press recently published.

Mazur dabbled in poetry in high school and college and wrote short stories for a brief stint in her youth. When she moved to Cambridge at the age of 27 and accompanied a friend to the Grolier Poetry Bookshop there, she discovered and fell in love with poetry anew. “It was as if I’d been struck by lightning, poetry lightning,” she said. “I was electrified by the poetry I was reading.”

“Those friendships have really been important to my work, especially the sharing of poems we love, and the loving critical eye we can bring to each other."

She went on, describing the ways in which the people she became acquainted with at the bookstore would inform her. She met many aspiring poets who would soon become friends as well as critics who helped Mazur to shape her poetry. “Those friendships have really been important to my work, especially the sharing of poems we love, and the loving critical eye we can bring to each other,” she said.

According to English instructor and Lamont Poet Committee member Todd Hearon, the Lamont Poet Committee, which meets bi-annually to select two applicants from a diverse bracket of talented poets, has had Mazur on their “wish list” of poets for a long time. “We were happy finally to be able to ask her to come,” he said. “She’s a star in American poetry, one of the really influential figures, especially among younger poets who have had her as their teacher and mentor.”

One of these poets is Exeter’s own English instructor, Matthew Miller, who took a poetry workshop with Mazur at Emerson College when he was a young aspiring writer. He found in her a kind and critical spirit who opened up a world of poetry for him and began to teach him about what it is to be a teacher. “Her lessons as a poet and her lessons as a teacher are ones I have tried to carry with me since that workshop I took those many years ago,” he said.

Miller went on, admiring the simultaneous technique and humanity of Mazur’s work. “Her poetry is wonderful blend of craft and heart,” he said. “She is technically perfect in her poems but never sacrifices real human emotion and experience in that technical perfection.”

Physics instructor Tanya Waterman, who also serves on the Lamont Poet Committee, commended Mazur for the uplifting and honest nature of her poetry. “Her poems are storytelling which make me think and feel and doubt,” she said. “She offers no sugar-coating of the edges, no comfortable resolutions, or convenient soothing of heartache, but she does help me take heart. With warmth and wit, her poetry gives me hope for our condition, with a dose of realism, and enduring love.”

Many in the Exeter community particularly enjoyed hearing Mazur’s poems brought to life as she read them aloud. “Poetry is meant to be read aloud, and it is interesting to hear which lines she emphasizes and where she pauses in her reading,” English instructor Wendy Mellin said.

English instructor Susan Repko agreed. “I love hearing a writer read their own work aloud,” she said. “Her work became more alive to me because I was hearing it in her voice.”

Hearon echoed this sentiment. “As always, the physical presence of the poet, as a voice to convey and converse about her own poems, is invaluable,” he said. “It’s like leaving your bottled water at home and coming to drink straight from the Hippocrene spring itself.”

Prior to Mazur’s reading, many English teachers taught her work, particularly to lowerclassman. Mellin taught poems from “Figures in a Landscape” to her lowers, who annotated and discussed the poems with the class. When Mazur attended one of Mellin’s classes, she spoke of the importance of details, both in poems and in personal narratives. According to Mellin, Mazur’s advice to favor details over metaphor as a means of connecting to the reader made a strong impact on the students. “Mazur’s advice to get all of the details down, then to whittle that list down to the ‘right’ details for the scene, really resonated with my students,” Mellin said.

Mazur enjoyed working with the students just as much as they enjoyed working with her. “I had a wonderful time at PEA,” she said. “The students were impressive—their curiosity, warmth and intelligence made our discussions very gratifying. I was amazed—and surprised—by their questions, what they liked, what they were curious about.”

English instructor Ellen Wolff taught Mazur’s “Forbidden City” with her ninth grade students, using several of the poems as prompts for short descriptive pieces. Wolff commended Mazur for her engaged style of teaching and thinking. “Gail Mazur struck me as a deeply meditative and interior poet, quite self-effacing and extremely interested in students’ ideas,” she said. “I imagine she’d be very at home at the Harkness table.”

She also expressed gratitude for the chance to hear about Mazur’s creative process, and the processes of other Lamont poets before her, both during their readings and their question and answer sessions. “I’m grateful when my students hear world class poets describing how hard writing is, and how important—and painful—revising is,” she said.

Mellin agreed, saying “We are so very lucky to hear a published author read her work and to have the opportunity to ask her questions,” she said.

Miller echoed this gratitude, both for the work Mazur did with students in class and for the impact the reading had on the community. “I think she really spoke to many of the student writers here,” he said. “Not everyone connects with poetry or particular for poets, but for those who connected with Gail’s poetry it was a life changing night.”