A Wise Teacher: Memoir

"My classes became more like ballet than like workshops. What did a piece of writing mean? Not what did it say, but what did it portend, or hint, or reveal, about the surely valid human impulse that brought it about. My job was not to correct but to understand and participate." William Stafford, You Must Revise Your Life.

According to Lu Chi:

"To learn writing from classics
  is like carving an axe handle with an axe," and
  then, "you must excavate your own soul,
  search yourself till your spirit is refreshed."

Our teacher Bruce Hoch has us read "When I was a kid I was a Buddhist and an atheist, but I kept making bargains with God," then says "Write about your bargains with God." When he hears what we have written, his face flushes, his eyes tear.

Sikong Tu advises that our writing "thins
to nothing" if we approach with too much effort.

Our teacher Bruce Hoch says, "Do not try so hard to be clever. When writing is too full, it is thus empty."

"Observe creation without taboos," writes Sikong Tu.
"Swallow a vast wilderness, then spit it out again."

Our teacher Bruce Hoch hands me The Art of Writing. Seeking the proper handle, intuition draws me to Snyder's "Axe Handles."

... I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
                 the pattern is not far off..."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

A wise teacher is an axe and we are handles, soon to be shaping again.

How we go on.