Haiku in the Workplace: The Mentor

Your poetical responses to this week’s challenge suggest that for the most part you regard your mentors with a good deal more fondness than your bosses.

a coach takes you there —
a mentor shows you how
to read maps
	[David Dayson]
a mentor never
tells you where to go —
but shows the way
	[David Dayson]

There was an occasional wry or cheeky response

a mentor
enables you to think —
inside the box
	[David Dayson]

but most were quite adulatory. Homage is characteristically a fulsome response, and makes for difficult poetic material. We gain perhaps a bit more appreciation for those Greek and Latin odists whose fame resides on just such compositions. For us, the consequence has been a somewhat slender range of response, as evidenced in our selections. All our shortlisted poems are somewhat more prosaic than poetic, more a listing of attributes than a courting of allusions. Nevertheless, they are not without their salient points.

Our third place selection considers the term itself, and compares it with its manifestation:

my ‘mentors’: the word
prefigures their rocklike stance,
that distant skyline
	[Sarah Leavesley]

Is this hyperbole intended as praise, or is there a trace of snark to be found here? Perhaps the quotation marks are the indicators of intent. If you were this poet’s ‘mentor’ would you feel honored? I’m not sure, and that, I think, is the poem’s greatest attribute.

My two co-winner both extend metaphors to honor their personal Nestors:

a mentor
knows the ropes —
untangles knots
	[David Dayson]
sticky business —
lubricated by the words
of a mentor
	[David Dayson]

It would not surprise me to learn these poems come from the same pen, they are so much of a piece. They employ identical strategies—the use of a stock phrase turned by the invocation of the mentor, who offers a solution appropriate to that phrase. In both instances the mentor comes to the rescue to solve a problem that is generalized, and calms the situation in the process. Both are unequivocally flattering, both are lean in language, both offer the same relationship to the master.

Who are you mentoring? How will they write about you? Remember that we are still reading Pindar 2500 years later . . .

New Poems

mentoring
at work
the lead goose
     — Ernesto P. Santiago
          *
sudden aging . . .
a young colleague asks me
“Be my mentor!”
     — Maria Laura Valente
          *
training day
learning just how
the boss likes his coffee
     — Rachel Sutcliffe
          *
avoiding eye contact
in the next urinal
my mentor
     — Mark Gilbert
          *
leadership lecture
reading through the summers
of the mentor’s mind
     — Willie Bongcaron
          *
orientation
a room full of bobble heads
sets in motion
     — Michael Henry Lee
          *
the boss's lunch
she shows me the tricks
first things first
     — Sandi Pray
          *
he resigned
I try to catch up . . . finish filling
his empty shoes
     — Paul Geiger
          *
shop floor
a copy of Dickens
by each locker
     — Lamart Cooper
          *
conference room —
a portrait of the painter
glances at everyone
     — Pravat Kumar Padhy
          *
morning
skies, striped in pink
his reminder to my eyes
     — Timothy J. Dickey
          *
new employee
I put on 
my motherly face
     — Marina Bellini
          *
Osho’s poems
the master’s wise words
on my pillow
     — Eufemia Griffo
          *
reflecting pool
her blue suit
and her mentor’s
     – Jennifer Hambrick
          *
mentor
amid lies and truth
gut instinct
mentore 
fra bugie e verità
istinto viscerale
     — Lucia Fontana
          *
alito pesante —
devo imparare 
molto in fretta
bad breath —
I  have to learn
very quickly
     — Angiola Inglese
          *
Crane’s shadow and mine 
expand
on Brooklyn Bridge
     — Anna Yin
          *
observing
my mentor shout
the real lessons
     — Christina Sng
          *
office orchid
I secure the growing spike
to a bamboo stake
     — Olivier Schopfer
          *
the boss tells her
she needs more mentoring
happy hour
     — Gregory Longenecker
          *
her high heels
and friendly smile
a hit with the rookie journos
     — Madhuri Pillai
          *
general hospital:
psychology tutor 
is a clinical case
     — Elisa Allo
          *
the paring 
of stone fruit 
hinged amity
     — Jan Benson
          *
office whirlwind —
my mentor 20 years
younger than me
     — Diana Teneva
          *
the mentor —
instinct to escape
in the legs
     — Margherita Petriccione
          *
path breaking foot prints
behind my son
i clean my glasses
     — Srinivasa Rao Sambangi
          *
for a long time
an essay consigliere —
my husband
     — Angela Giordano
          *
mentor
don’t make me laugh
office tormentor
     — Karen Harvey
          *
bookshop owner
how I owe what
I have come to know
     — Ron Scully
          *
haiku critiques
unsparingly . . .
trusted friend
     — Marietta McGregor
          *
A four-leaf clover
in the lawn of clover 
Rare luck
Un quadrifoglio
nel prato di trifoglio
Rara fortuna
     — Lucia Cardillo
          *

Next Week’s Theme: Interns & Trainees

Send your poem using “workplace haiku” as the subject by Sunday midnight to our Contact Form. Good luck!

From October 2014 through April 2016 Haiku Foundation president Jim Kacian offered a column on haiku for the London Financial Times centered on the theme of work. Each week we share these columns with the haiku community at large, along with an invitation to join in the fun. Submit a poem by Sunday midnight on the theme of the week, from the classical Japanese tradition, or contemporary practice, or perhaps one of your own, which you might even write for the occasion. The best of these will be appended to the column. First published 9 January 2015.