What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
I guess early on it was e.e. cummings. All and any of the concrete stuff I saw early on was a revelation of course. I enjoyed a correspondence with j. w. curry in the early 1990s that triggered a lot of thought. Serge Segay’s Zaum stuff blew my mind. John M. Bennett, Ficus Strangulensis, J. Lehmus and the other folks I met and collaborated through the mail-art network. They all showed me that really anything goes. And it could be fun and completely un-precious.
The two or three pieces I saw by Space Daisy also made me perk up as did a short lived correspondence I had with a now missing poet named Cameron Conklin who wrote under the name Dead Sarah. They sent original odd hand scrawled word plays to my university’s lit journal only to be completely ignored - what a bunch of boring twits. I was enamoured and wrote back, still have those precious papers.
I can’t not mention the anonymous writers and designers, the weather, the children, the accidents. Poetry is not solely the province of directed human intention. So much of it floats in these spaces where it’s never even seen let alone picked out and considered poetry by some wise guy like me.
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