What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
When I was in high school and in my undergraduate degree, I was taken with the work of Canadian poets Dorothy Livesay and Raymond Souster. Livesay was important for me because she wrote feminist poetry, which was really exciting, and I think I would add Margaret Atwood’s poetry in there too. Souster’s work spoke to me because of its simplicity, its openness, and its imagery. When I was in graduate school, I took a course on the long poem, and while we read some amazing stuff (William Carlos Williams’ “Paterson”, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger come to mind), the one that really stood out for me was Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly”. I loved the idea that you could write a poem with such music, with such repetition, and with the idea that you could break away from some of the more traditional conventions about writing poetry that had been so strongly inculcated in the study of English literature up until that time. It was like a revelation for me.
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