Ron perched on the edge of the desk. He held a book of poems in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

“We’ll work on Japanese forms today,” he said. “The tanka. Show me what you’ve got.”

Over the weekend he had assigned Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. We were required to read over the tanka in translation and come to class with five works of our own to share.

Ron liked to introduce us to different forms in our poetry class. We tried the tanka, the cinquain, occasionally the sestina, and, though rarely, the rondel. Mostly we worked in free form, but that often led students to want to “rhyme” anyway, and it drove Ron crazy.

I think to avoid forced rhymes and cliches, he pushed us to conform to different poetic styles.
Ron never belabored rules or even introduced the history behind the forms or the more subtle demands. He just wanted us to think about poetry in new ways.

If he’d been a stickler for details, I’m sure most of us would have shut down. Counting syllables and lines was already a challenge for this beginners’ class.

It must have been hell reading over our tired efforts week after week, year after year. But Ron never complained, at least not within earshot of his students.

His remarks on my homework papers were always encouraging. Occasionally he would suggest a word change or a line break. More often than not he added a cryptic comment.

“Channeling the spirits here,” he might write. Or, “as Ezra said, ‘keep it accurate; keep it clear’.”

I was never really sure what to make of these exhortations.

I just knew that Ron was “cool,” with his trim goatee and gravely mumble.

He founded the St. Andrews Writers Forum, which brought to campus such literary luminaries as Joel Oppenheimer, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Creeley, and others. He published the works of established and emerging writers in the many prestigious journals he ran, among them the St. Andrews Review.

In addition to his teaching and mentoring, Ron was a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow in American Literature and an inductee in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. A distinguished poet and writer, he published 16 books of poetry, three critical works, two plays, and seven collaborative works with visual artists.

My sister Beth introduced me to Ron. She had attended St. Andrews College ahead of me and on holidays would come home with stories about her adventures there, parties, boys, and Ron.

She majored in poetry, participated in poetry readings, and at the end of her senior year won a chapbook award and published her first book of poetry. When Beth talked poetry, she always spoke of Ron.

I set my sights on St. Andrews as a result; I wanted to study with Ron.

It was Ron who introduced me to Japanese literature.

I remember asking his advice when I was a sophomore in late 1975. My parents were planning to spend the next four years in Fukuoka, Japan as missionaries. They wanted me to spend my junior year with them and were willing to make arrangements for me to enter a program at Seinan Gakuin University for international students.

“I don’t know, Ron,” I said. “I don’t think I want to go.”

“Not go?” Ron’s gaze was sharp, even a little frightening. “Why the hell not?”

I knew Ron was very fond of Japan. He had once met Yukio Mishima and was a huge fan. I’d read some of Mishima’s works and I’d enjoyed the tanka we’d explored in Ron’s poetry classes, but I just didn’t feel a great affinity for Japan. I had made a circle of friends at St. Andrews and for the first time felt comfortable and accepted. I didn’t want to lose that.

Besides, wouldn’t it be strange to spend a full year living with my parents again? I was finally on my own.

“You should go,” Ron said. “Opportunities like this don’t come along often. Or ever.”

I went back to my dorm room and thought about it.

Ron was right. I knew he was. I needed to step outside the familiar. I needed to challenge myself.

And so I went.

Being in Japan changed everything; it gave me direction.

When I returned to the United States the following year, I knew what I wanted to do. And what I wanted to do was continue to study Japan and Japanese.

Ron helped me gain admission to Columbia University and off to graduate school I went.

While I was in New York, Ron visited a number of times. We met in the city, and he introduced me to his prolific acquaintances from the Japanese art world: Hiroaki Sato, the poet and translator, and Yoshimasu Gozo, the poet, photographer, and filmmaker.

Once, while I was there, the Japanese novelist, Abe Kōbō came through with his play “Chiisai zo ga shinda” (The Little Elephant is Dead) a surreal piece he staged at the famed La MaMa Theatre.

Ron sent me a flurry of letters with instructions to buy tickets:

Well. I have made a plane reservation to fly up on Monday the 14th of May for the Abe doings. I’m enclosing a check in the hope that you can buy me a ticket and mail it to me by return mail or a.s.a.p.—here. I will either stay with Yozo or at the Taft, if he is occupied. So I hope we can get together either before or after.

I got the tickets. Ron changed our meeting place two or three times. But in the end, I saw the play with him. We met Kōbō himself, along with Gozo Yoshimasu and Hiroaki Sato.

Being in Ron’s presence was always a whirlwind.

He had people to see and places to go, and he did what he could to sweep me up in his vortex. He never forgot the play I had written, which he adored, and so much of his attention was spent on trying to get it published.

With huge gobs of luck I wd like to whiz thru Tokyo next summer and talk with Yoko [Mishima] about it. Which is to say to you—don’t show it to people you can’t trust. It is so good and there are so many swine about the theatre world and the publishing world, I’d not give ‘em an inch. . . . If it is as good as I think it is, you should get a very good cut out of any copyright contract—if not the copyright and a good cut from a contract. I’m pretty naïve, but . . . keep the powder dry!

Ron never gave up on me.

Now that I look back at the encouraging letters he sent me to Raleigh, New York, Fukuoka, and St. Louis, I realize how dear he was to me.

I wish I had given him more in return.

Yet here I am on the cusp of my retirement remembering how much I owe to Ron for coaxing me into Japanese Studies.

Ron died a few years ago, and his obituaries provided a testament to just how important he had been, not just to me, but to so many other students and writers and to the larger writing community.

He led an active, peripatetic, and creative life. I was only a bit player in that drama, but he always made me feel like a rising star.

Ronald H. Bayes was a fabulous mentor. And I should compose a tanka, a sestina, or even a rondel in his honor.

Instead, I offer this account of a young student unsure of her own talents, hesitant to claim a new direction, but open to her mentor’s advice.

Thank you, Ron.