There is no good reason for me to be here.

It’s late August 1992, and I’m a freshman at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, 20 miles west of Washington, D.C. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I have four straight 50-minute classes at 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, and 11:30. 

These are all gen-ed classes I’ve signed up for as a matter of course, just looking to check boxes and maybe create big chunks of free time to manage poorly. I enter college as an English major after the good fortune of realizing early—in 10^th grade—that my life should be devoted to the arts.

This 10:30 a.m. class, however, isn’t creative writing or literature; it’s just English 101: Freshman Composition. I am here for the most ordinary of reasons: everyone must take this class.

He tells us his name is Evan, that he is from Colorado, that he just graduated in May from the MFA program in poetry. He wrestled in high school and worked as a roofer. I will later find out that his parents are divorced and that he is into the Beat Generation, particularly Jack Kerouac.

It feels like an electric eel is swimming around in my stomach, but I hang around after class, tell him I, too, am a poet and love Kerouac, and he is casually encouraging. He is also ruggedly handsome with black hair and blue eyes. Who is this muscular, athletic, working-class poet? Who knew that men could be like this?

It feels like an electric eel is swimming around in my stomach, but I hang around after class, tell him I, too, am a poet . . .

Evan occasionally collects our freewriting, as well as our journals, and I am often writing with him in mind as a reader, sometimes directly to him. I let it fly in my freewriting. I so loved that intimacy of Ginsberg and Kerouac, and it is much like Kerouac enumerated in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”: In the “struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind,” one should “believe in the holy contour of life,” but also “accept loss forever.” You’re to “write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind” because there is “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience.”

But I am also aware of being on a kind of stage, of having a reader, an audience. Something about this dual public-privacy is thrilling.

Early on in that fall semester, we’re talking after class and everyone else is gone. His voice is slightly sleepy, but his words are consciously direct.

“Have you ever had a mentor?”

I only know my answer was to the effect of No, but I’d sure like one.

I soon start attending office hours to show him poems, watch him make cuts and line breaks, ponder questions I’ve never considered, and write down writers, books, even journals that he recommends: The Catcher in the Rye, Plum Review, Jacaranda Review, the already by-then defunct Scrivener (GMU’s undergrad publication). He recites James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” the end of which shoves me out of the pastoral-but-slightly-sinister imagery’s vague trance:

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

I write rambling, energetic poems, often with a point or feeling I want to convey, but digressive, chatty, full of jazzy tangents, what a later teacher Eric Pankey will call “fast on the curves,” entirely enamored with the Beats’ apparent dismissal of control.

At one point with one such poem, he says, “Look. Just look at this,” begins to count the syllables in each line, and jots the number in the margin.

This is way too formal and quantitative for my deluded, wannabe-wildman self-concept.

“Aw man . . .” I groan, “Come on, don’t be—”

“Ah-uh. No, no. Oh no, baby—”

“Psh.”

“No. Look at this.”

“What?”

“15, 16, 9, 8, 11, 17. Why is that? You’re all over the place. Why? Do you know why?”

“Hell, that’s just the way I wrote it, man. It’s just the way it came out.” “That’s not enough. You have to have some idea. You’re talented, but you’re too easy on yourself and need discipline. You’ve got to start paying attention to some of these things.”

2.

That was the first time I remember Evan dressing me down. The second was the draft of a research paper which began, predictably, with me just wanting to celebrate Kerouac’s greatness and share my own impressionistic riffing.

On what we might nowadays call a “discovery draft,” Evan let me know, curtly, that although my enthusiasm was a good thing, it didn’t substitute for scholarship. And by God, I was in college now and it was time I honored my talent with becoming a real student.

Two weeks later, in his comments on the last page of a full rough draft, he lit into me for dismissing the academic mode for creative soloing with a handful of tossed-in quotes from secondary sources. What resulted? A draft with a vague subject but no direction, let alone traction, and that was because I didn’t take the entire endeavor seriously enough. I felt horrible and hated the internal whining and griping that his criticism awakened.

Still, somewhere in the next day or so, I managed to concentrate on one of his comments that offered a way forward through being both combative and protective. Before, my paper had just been a broad, fizzy celebration of Jack Kerouac, but now Evan suggested I make it a defense of Kerouac’s work against specific claims.

Evan let me know, curtly, that although my enthusiasm was a good thing, it didn’t substitute for scholarship.

He mentioned social critic Norman Podhoretz’s essay “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” published in 1958, right at the height of the popularity of On the Road and not long after the high-profile 1957 obscenity trial against the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in San Francisco. Podhoretz’s title pretty much says it all, but he made all sorts of critiques against my guys and especially my #1, Jack.

Evan suggested I find that essay, establish Podhoretz’s position on the Beats, focusing on Kerouac, and then explain where he was wrong, quoting not only from Kerouac’s work or interviews, but from his fellow writers’ statements, from positive reviewers, and—most unusual yet important for my development—from some of the Beats’ literary lineage: Walt Whitman and William Blake.

So I actually did some research. I found Podhoretz’s essay in the library, read it, and promptly became more pissed off at Norman than I was at Evan. I started annotating, then found a couple of positive reviews of Kerouac, annotated those, scoured my own Ginsberg and Whitman books I’d bought in high school, reading their critical introductions, annotating those.

But I only knew a little Blake at the time, from an old Oscar Williams poetry anthology I’d bought in a used bookstore while visiting relatives in Germany during the summer of 1991. I’d loved one short poem of his (“Eternity”), but that was about it.

That weekend, some friends and I went into D.C. and stopped at Kramer Books in DuPont Circle, where I found, sure enough, a selected Blake. I rarely carried a backpack in those days (I pretentiously liked to casually show off my reading), and later we stopped to give some change to a man on the street. Moving on, just a few steps away from him, he noticed my book.

“Ahh, William Blake!” I guessed he was in his 50s. I said something vague like, “Yeah man, right on,” and continued down the street, but he raised his voice, in an almost exultant sigh, and started reciting:

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I was struck. It seemed like a message from somewhere, something about the obliteration of my assumptions. Close on the heels of that message, This really is going to be your life, the world seemed to say.

Incorporating Blake into my Kerouac paper made me stretch: out into the world beyond my own subjective enthusiasms or gripes, into the pages of the past, always piling higher and farther out, out along a sidewalk where a man on the edge of society called to me, smiling, to wake up: somehow he already knew the words inside my book.

3.

The most profound result of my time with him was that he offered me a different model of what it means to be a man.

Evan knew when to give me a kick in the ass and when to pat me on the back, but the most profound result of my time with him was that he offered me a different model of what it means to be a man.

I grew up Virginia Beach—in terms of area and population the biggest city in the Commonwealth, a curious mix of suburban sprawl, farmland, and the oceanfront. There were a dozen military installations, a distinct but generally mild Southern drawl, a thread of skater and surf culture, a couple of minor-league sports teams (baseball and hockey), an intriguing side-connection to New York City, a general assumption of white bread conservatism, and water everywhere.

Growing up, I was surrounded by the taken-for-granted attitudes about masculinity. Straight. Strong. Generally, women were objects of reverence (your momma and other elders), responsibility (your wife), or desire (your mistress or at least your fantasy of one). You drank domestic beer. In cans. You loved America, believed its myths, were suspicious of provocative questions. You grilled, you loved sports, your yard was your pride. You worked your ass off to provide for that wife and those kids and to take care of your parents. You were not one for the arts. You valued the practical: working on your car, maintaining your home. You seemed to not understand sensitivity.

I was OK with most of this. I understood the honor of taking care of your family, I loved sports, and even though I have always been very slow with mechanics, I did love working with my hands and the earth. I understood the satisfaction of a mown lawn and loved the feel of a shovel heavy with earth, the soft rattle of tossing it into a pile or back into a hole. I occasionally chopped wood after school for our woodstove—I was barely any good, but enjoyed it, and felt the pride.

But that stuff about women, the arts, questioning, sensitivity—it never felt right, and so I always felt just a bit outside traditional manhood.

Evan was an athlete, a laborer, and an artist; in my life, there was no precedent for that combination of attributes. I knew a few artistic types who did manual labor but were never athletes. I knew plenty of men who were athletes and laborers, but none of them, to my knowledge, were also artists of any kind. You didn’t advertise that kind of thing, even if you were a musician, perhaps the only one that’s kind of respectable, since music is often accompanied by beer. When I met Evan in August 1992, one of my earliest revelations—although I didn’t consciously perceive it then—was, “Oh, I am ok. You can be into all of those things. I can be an artist andstill ‘be a man.’”

4.

For our final project, Evan assigned something pretty un-freshman-academic-composition-like: an entirely self-designed, self-directed project. We could do whatever we wanted, as long as it mattered, had shape, went through some kind of process and schedule that we consulted on him with, and demonstrated some important principles of writing. I’ve lost the project itself, and I remember nothing of mine except that it was a creative work, a big mesh of poems and prose sketches from the semester, some stretching back to high school. But I do still have a scan of a photocopy of its title page. I cringe and laugh now when I see I titled it “Volcanoes,” but here are some excerpts from Evan’s comments:

You’re the real thing […] but beware! The poetic power can leave. Honor it, nurture it, slave for it, or the Angel will go on to the next poet’s house . . .

Let me reiterate what all the brilliant heroes have said (because you’re going to need to memorize these in yr despair; being a poet ain’t no box of chocolates)

• follow yr bliss, yr heart and yr vision
• love the questions themselves
• love all those things you’re “sick” of

Use yr youth in something real, in something that will challenge every resource you have—go to your fear; go to the adventure. Have faith. Act as though you have vision and your vision will grow. Your love and respect for yourself will grow. Avoid the distractions and affectations of the middle-class youth culture.

Take yourself seriously.

World without end.

Amen.

One of my copies of Evan’s comments is on my classroom wall. I share it with my 12^th graders in college composition and creative writing students every semester, every year. I tell them how he wrote it to me in December 1992, but it applies to them today, if they just substitute their name for “Andy,” and more importantly, substitute whatever it is they’re interested in for anytime he mentions poetry or being a poet. It can be the sport they love, their potential major in college, the job they already have and far prefer to school, the trade they’re learning at the vocational-technical school our high school is partnered with. It doesn’t matter, as long as it matters.

I signed up for another class with Evan for the spring 1993 semester, and our talks about poetry continued, and he continued to expand my world, introducing me to two other pivotal poets—Carolyn Forché, a professor, and Jeff McDaniel, a recent MFA graduate—who would in turn expand and deepen my world even more.

Carolyn lets me take upper-level poetry classes, including one that’s actually a graduate class, and will shepherd me through graduate school—in that same MFA program both Evan and Jeff attended. Jeff introduces me to the slam world of early 90s Washington, D.C., on Monday nights at the 15 Minutes Club, where I become a regular.

“Have faith. Act as though you have vision and your vision will grow. Your love and respect for yourself will grow.”

And then, after hanging around northern Virginia for a year as an adjunct instructor after finishing his MFA, Evan headed back to Colorado to teach at Loveland Community College, where he is now chair.

But every so often, especially in my sophomore year of college, in between trips to 15 Minutes, classes on campus, shifts on the changeover crew at the campus arena, and playing cards and drinking beer with friends, I re-read Evan’s comments on my project. For at least a year, they never fail to make me cry, both because they seem to tell me that what I am is OK, but also that what I am requires work. It’s that beautiful double-edged sword of self-acceptance but also a devotion to reaching out farther, wider, deeper.

“Have faith. Act as though you have vision and your vision will grow. Your love and respect for yourself will grow” is the big one. I’m slapped by how lost I was at 18: I’m not sure I really loved or respected myself at the time (I buried so much), and it took him saying those two things would grow—if I truly committed to my/the arts—to realize that I didn’t. Maybe that’s why I broke open when I’d read that sentence—they spoke a truth I didn’t see but was no less real.

Evan knew when to give me a kick in the ass, when to give me a pat on the back, and in passages like that, he knew when to inspire—with insight, with slightly-terrifying directness, and with hope.

And that’s what teachers do anyway. Describing his childhood experience in school, Appalachian poet and education activist Willie Carver says it as beautifully as anyone I know has:

This ragtag group of kids would come into the room and this teacher would stand in front of us and see something that we were not yet. She saw in that group of hillbilly kids on the floor someone who’s going to write a paragraph, she saw someone who knows the letter B by the end of the day, someone who’s going to know algebra. And they would say words, and then we would become what they envisioned. That’s magic.

There was no good reason for me to be in his class, but when Evan made those predictions, urged me to dig in and reach out, he was giving me something to imagine, something to always be becoming.

Sometimes I tell my students that, at its best, education is a paradox: it makes you dig down into yourself as well as reach out to the rest of the world. I tell them stories about the complexity and contradictions in myself and loved ones, and try to model comfort and patience with that, an ability to sit with what doesn’t make immediate sense, or what continues to elude grasp for decades. Over time, my openness with them tends to build trust, and with that trust, I ask them to take this mindset of paradox, even just a little. Maybe it’ll broaden and deepen how they read themselves and each other. Maybe it’ll sensitize and balance their navigation of every generation’s tortuous rivers. Maybe it will charge and change how they write their own lives, as Evan’s example did mine.

Read more by Andy Fogle:
• “The Essential, Vulnerable, Art-Making Self: A Conversation with Poet Annie Woodford“
• “Playing with Difficulty: High School Seniors Explore Challenging Literature with Arthur Sze’s QUIPU“
• “Seeking the Silk Dragon: A Conversation with Arthur Sze“

Featured photo: Jack Kerouac Naval Reserve Enlistment, 1943.