What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Honestly two come immediately to mind. In the order I discovered them I would say without hesitation Michael Robbins and Russell Edson. Prior to these two, Michael Ondaatje made a long-lasting impression on me, but that came through his masterpiece Coming Through Slaughter and not his poetry.
Michael Robbins had to have known when he finished writing his collection Alien vs. Predator that he had brought about a formidable shift of the poetic sensibility. Here’s a guy with a PhD. in poetry who is writing poems that every single person I’ve ever shown loves. Every single one. Memorable lines that unabashedly rhyme and take on other hyper-traditional structures and forms but have a kind of serious playfulness that is beyond what any other poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, or playwright out there is doing. I’ll buy and read anything he writes forever.
But for total fearlessness, Russell Edson can’t be matched. Often called the godfather of prose poetry, the amazing thing is that he could have cared less about that. He didn’t care what was expected. Among many other blindingly imaginative poems, he wrote about a woman fighting a tree, a family having apes for dinner, farmers falling in love with hats. And in the midst of such faith in his own voice, there was his sense of adventure and risk. He is quoted as saying, “I sit down to write with a blank page and a blank mind. Wherever the organ of reality (the brain) wants to go I follow with the blue-pencil of consciousness.”
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