When I walked into an independent bookstore recently and saw Apprentice of the Flower Poet Z. on a table of new fiction paperbacks, I picked it up because of its title and then read the first of the back cover blurbs: “A splendid satire of literary life…Annabelle is the perfect naïf, the babe in the academic woods who only slowly and painfully discovers that her mentor is her tormentor. — The Boston Globe ”

As a student in a graduate creative writing program, I had befriended a classmate who was tormented by her mentor, and I had observed many other tortured mentees at close range in my graduate school classes.  It took only the title and the blurb to get me to the cash register. A few days later I sat down for a wonderful comic read about the world of poets and their students in academia.  I immediately identified with Annabelle as she whole-heartedly pursues her passion and engages with her professor as a conscientious nobody thrown into close contact with a circle of somebodies who pretty much ignore her. Though there is one professor who is sympathetic to her and the fact that she came to college to study poetry writing, that professor is heavily criticized by the “inner circle” whenever Annabelle brings her up.

If you have ever come to a course in writing or a writing workshop with your whole heart and soul only to be left feeling like an outsider, this book will have you laughing even as you feel some uncomfortable tugs on your heart-strings. If you haven’t had the experience, you will still recognize your feelings in Annabelle as she tries to stay focused on what a literary life demands of the mind, heart and character.

The book is rich with characters who are hypocritical yet manage to instruct their students.  There is Annabelle’s mentor, the flower poet Z. who is be installed as Chancellor of the Society for the Preservation of American Poetry despite only a cursory knowledge of the work of great American poets such as Emily Dickinson. She has Annabelle research images she will later use in her poems because she is too busy to find her own images and so writes only the blueprints and fills them in with Annabelle’s research.  But on the subject of poetry, she skillfully and appropriately paraphrases what Dylan Thomas wrote in “In My Craft or Sullen Art” to describe poetry’s purpose:

…I don’t write for ambition or money, not for fame or the great white way, but for the lovers asleep in their beds, holding each other and the grief of the ages.

Other characters include Braun, a feminist poet who supports writing the truth about oneself no matter what unless, it turns out, that the truth embarrasses her as well as a teacher who addresses a workshop Annabelle attends this way:

Now what is confessional poetry, anyway? I guess we need to start with confession, which is the disclosing of one’s sin in the sacrament of reconciliation.  It’s the act of unburdening oneself.  And did you know that in the Middle Ages torture was the means to exact a confession?

 I suppose what I mean to say is that when you set out to unburden yourselves this morning, understand that pain is sometimes necessary for a poem to be born.  Human beings are born into great pain. Women give birth in great pain. Birth is about blood and pain. And that’s a curse, and it’s also a gift. Now go and enjoy the process.

Each of these characters believes their understanding is the one true understanding, yet each is true.  No one person or school of thought has the market cornered on describing poetry’s purpose and no one person or school of thought can legitimately declare there is one and only one way to serve that purpose.

The established poets in this novel are people busy vying for honors, positions, and lovers and using students they mentor for emotional and logistical support, asking them to perform all kinds of tasks unrelated to writing (such as buying underwear for an illicit lover).  The real answer to the question, “What is Poetry” comes again and again through the character of Annabelle Goldsmith.  Whether she is enclosing dried rose petals for the poet Z. to put in her letter to a colleague or recounting reading Yeats to the aged but once influential literary critic Mrs. Van Elder, who brought the poet Z. to prominence, Annabelle takes poetry writing, her apprenticeship to the poet Z. and her life seriously. The lines she reads from Yeats summarize her student life:

Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

And it is from her heart that Annabelle not only writes but responds to Z.  When in a moment Annabelle takes as an intimate one, Z. asks her to reveal her writing process, Annabelle says, “Well, I guess I find a word, like raw, for example and just do a riff on it. ‘Raw: the green, uncooked stem of the half-eaten flower.'”

Although Z. is fishing for information she can use in her teaching and is resistant to actually reading Annabelle’s poems, she is instrumental in getting Annabelle an apartment in the city so that she will live nearer to Z. and not be tired from commuting to school from Long Island. And though Annabelle is delighted by the Greenwich Village apartment, she is also quite disappointed. Z. not only never takes a moment to look at her poem about Emily Dickinson but assigns her high school senior-aged daughter the task of interviewing famous poets on their opinions and insights about Dickinson’s poems instead of having Annabelle do it.  Z. asks Annabelle to merely transcribe the tapes, though Annabelle created both the idea for the book and the interview questions.  Ever the poet-in-training, however, Annabelle doesn’t end her apprenticeship and thinks about herself outside of school in the life footsteps of another revered poet:

And so that is how I, who had once wandered the Walt Whitman Mall in Long Island for cultural stimulation, moved to the one-time capital of literary Bohemia, the place where Edna St. Vincent Millay lived in a room narrower than mine and had a million love affairs.

I believe that Annabelle is going to make it without Z. because she is shaping her young life with poetry on her mind at all times. Eventually, she attends a weekend poetry-writing workshop where students are told, “This weekend we’re going to write a poem about a secret. Something you’ve never told anyone, that means a great deal to you.” Late at night, unable to sleep, Annabelle arises and records this poem about her crush on her mentor Z.:

The Solution of Poetry

Let x = my mother.

Let y = Z.
If infinity = question mark,

And New York is equidistant from Boston,

Then

Is the sum of my distance from Long Island =

To the sum of my distance from Z.?

Can u ever = y?

As reader, I think, “No, Annabelle, I don’t think so, though ‘u’ and ‘y’ are trapped in a basic question all poets ask themselves–how can I use my life, the images that catch my eye, my passions and my personal history to write into the unknown?”

If poetry is a solution, it is a chemical solution–into which we drop our feelings and our images until they coalesce and come back to us as new material.  Sometimes the solution is transformed by a catalyst such as a hypocritical teacher, a selfish lover, an inept parent, or a way of looking at a flower.  What matters is using the poetic process of inquiry to write about the experience we are having. As the poet Z. tells her young assistant:

Poetry is not about the agonies of the soul, Annabelle. Sit down and write.  Something will come. If virginity is your passion, you will find a way to write about it.  Poems–even about virginity–come from passion.

Reading this novel, readers will ask themselves what their passions and disappointments are. They will ask themselves if they are willing to write about them even if no one else seems to care.

Far from a vindictive tell-all exposé about falseness inside poetry circles, Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. is a tale of involvement in learning, of coming of age with words and of finding the ability to take everything in to surpass one’s teachers.  Reading this book provides a refresher course on what one learns when one holds a question dear:  All that happens becomes part of the answer.

In this story, Annabelle actually apprentices to more than just Z.  She learns from a lover who is writing a book about writing at the desk of his mentor who died writing.  He insists he needs Annabelle to be his sexual muse as Nora had been in Joyce’s work.  In addition to his selfish demands, she experiences the dysfunctional dynamics of Z.’s family and of the University creative writing department. Ultimately, she sets out to write a poem that will liberate her, but instead of her words becoming a poem, they become the novel.

What is poetry? A force that drives one to seek truth and report it even if this involves stealing (the book begins with T.S. Eliot’s words, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”) Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. is a book that reminds its readers that those who we proclaim master poets and teachers of poetry writing are merely human and well endowed with an array of human frailties. Reading about Annabelle’s apprenticeship reminded me of my own teachers, who were also busy having affairs, grooming students for academic jobs and exploiting their subservience. These teachers said of poems that they were smarter than they were. This book is all about that and a pleasure to read.