What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
In Forces of Imagination, Barbara Guest opened my eyes to the possibilities of analyzing writing and art, illustrating how theory (never an interest of mine) could be accessible, beautiful; how a discussion of art can itself be art. (I later became a member of Kelsey Street, which published Forces.) Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” introduced me to his theory of field poetics, giving me permission to view the page as a space where a poet can feel free to create a form that is “an extension of content.” From Gertrude Stein, I learned the possibilities of repetition, and of bypassing the rules of punctuation and grammar to achieve something particular in a poem. At Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, I took a class called “Martian Poetics,” inspired by Jack Spicer’s Vancouver lectures—poetics of the strange. My chapbook It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed of someone involves a speaker communicating with an alien of sorts and features communication via radio signals—all references to these lectures. I encountered most of these poetic icons at the University of San Francisco—that is where my writing completely changed, essentially from being somewhat traditional to being experimental in form and content—a shift resulting from encountering these poets and others in the program, as well as exposure to the work of my classmates and teachers.
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