I’ve been revisiting the poetry of Minnesota’s own Robert Bly lately. Coming back to old things that inspired us years ago can be like stepping onto a fantastic, slow-moving train bringing us to places long forgotten, returning to us with a vibrancy and crispness rivaling the original.

So it’s been for me with Robert Bly. He is without question Minnesota’s most celebrated poet, our current — and only — poet laureate. Bly is kind of a rock star to me—an 82-year-old rock star, but a rock star nonetheless. I’ll concede that beyond English majors and various other eccentrics, there aren’t a lot of folks out there who give poets rock star status, but I can’t help but feel the others might be missing something.

The rock star feeling was definitely there when I had the opportunity to interview Bly in the mid ’90s for my college’s literary arts magazine. I had written him a flattering “you’re my hero” type of letter, taking a shot in the dark that he would grant us an interview and a few poems for our spring edition. To my utter surprise and delight he accepted, and a few weeks later I found myself sipping tea and talking poetry with him in the kitchen of his Minneapolis home. I even used his bathroom. It was dreamy.

One of the poems we discussed over tea was his own “Gratitude to Old Teachers.” Using a frozen lake as a metaphor, Bly writes, “When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake … we walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy. Who is down there but our teachers?” The idea of my frumpy junior high science teacher drifting about in a semi-frozen state somewhere beneath the icy surface of Lake Crystal is both striking and disturbing to me.

But the poet here is of course speaking figuratively when saying, “water that once could take no human weight — we were students then — holds up our feet … beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.” Put simply, wherever we go our past teachers provide support beneath our feet. Typically thought of as a hindrance, ice can actually allow passage to places we couldn’t otherwise go.

So do the lessons we’ve learned from our teachers.

As a teacher myself, it’s tempting to interpret Bly’s use of teacher in a formal sense and pat myself and my colleagues on the back, but I’m convinced that — like most of us — Bly has encountered many of his best teachers outside the classroom. We’re surrounded by teachers, from ones we know intimately to those we know only distantly but learn from nevertheless.

One of my favorite “teachers” was an old custodian named Mel whom I worked with for three summers in my teens. Economics required him to work well past the age of retirement, and the hot summers in an unconditioned elementary school wore on him. Mel was a sweet guy who did good work. He warned me in advance that he was prone to falling asleep anytime he stopped moving and asked me to wake him whenever I noticed him dosing off, which I did nearly every day during our afternoon break. I never mastered the art of power-napping through Mel’s example, but he taught me a few other lessons along the way.

One came on a day when Mel’s boss, John, showed up unexpectedly. John worked at a different building, so a week or two could pass without our seeing him. He was a reputed hothead, but I’d yet to witness one of his tirades in person. He arrived that day angry about something Mel might have done, walking right up to him and launching into an expletive-filled lecture so painful to witness that I desperately wanted to leave the room.

As I started drifting toward the exit, John held up his hand, signaling I should stay. After he was done with Mel, he simply nodded at me and left, suggesting that while the lecture hadn’t been directed at me, it was important that I witnessed it. He apparently thought in my 17-year-old naivety that I would either be intimidated or impressed by his show of power—neither of which was true. I was actually incredibly angry at the disrespect he’d shown a good, kind man who was 25 years his senior.

Mel, oddly, appeared for the most part unaffected by John’s tongue lashing, and during our afternoon break I found the nerve to ask why he hadn’t defended himself. Mel simply said, “John’s an angry man, and I figure it don’t have much to do with me. It’s probably best we keep it that way.”

What a lesson: Understand our opposition. Understand that it’s not always about us personally. Understand that meeting disrespect and anger with equal disrespect and anger accomplishes nothing, that loud angry voices are not indicators of real power.

One might suggest Mel was just a pushover, but I disagree. He chose his battles carefully, knowing which ones were worth his time and which ones would simply waste his ever-receding stores of energy. Mel was a teacher who engaged the world with a small ego and a good heart. We are all teachers, from our finest poets, to those sweeping the hallways after us. Robert, Mel — gratitude all around.

Jeremy Corey-Gruenes is an English teacher at Albert Lea High School.