What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
No one is more important to me than Sylvia Plath. Her poetry broke everything I thought I knew about poetry, so many of which I learned in high school from Victorian poets. She showed me how a simple word could be elevated through cadence and contrast. Lines like “You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe” are so deceptively easy but also musical, but then she takes those long oos of do and shoe and shutting them down with “in which I have lived like a foot”—did the word foot ever feel so cramped, so final? And she opens it up again with “barely daring to breath or achoo,” which is delightfully comical. And she does this kind of thing over and over. I could read her all day.
Before her, I was really in love with Robert Browning, and I still love the way a poem like “Porphyria’s Lover” is part horror film, part confession. I remember reading that poem the first time as a high school sophomore and thinking, Whoa! Poetry isn’t supposed to be this violent, is it? But it is, and it’s beautiful. Understanding how Browning’s confessional dramatic monologues were fictions helped me understand Plath’s work as a constructed fiction as well, which I think is really important to unpacking her work and getting past the autobiographical way writers like Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes framed her poetry in general and Ariel in particular.
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