What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Some contemporary American poets whose names escape me taught me that poetry doesn’t need to have a nice and tidy ending. At times, you can feel an ending approaching in a poem, like in music, but those poets would stop their poems abruptly, and leave me reeling. I really liked that effect, so I started doing it in my poems. Also, I read Michael Prior’s Model Disciple, where I first encountered contemporary instances of couplets. Prior is not the first person to write this way, but when I saw his work, it struck me as "pleasant" way of organizing a poem, so I do this a lot. The poets who write around me - Faith Arkorful, Khashayar Mohammadi, Dominik Parisien, Nisa Malli, and others - teach me that poetry can tell stories in such wonderful ways, and I try to invoke a storytelling attitude when I sit down to create.
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