What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Well, there are my teachers—Phillis Levin, Michael Collier, Stanley Plumly, Elizabeth Arnold, Joshua Weiner. Each of them was and remains incredibly important to my writing. But aside from direct tutelage, I’ve had countless moments reading poems and books that have altered my sense of what a poem is or can do, and therefore what I need to be willing to bring to the page, creatively. I think of these as moments from which there is no going back. One of the earliest such experiences I had was encountering Tomaž Šalamun’s poem “History” as an undergraduate. It was like nothing I had ever read before. There is the impossible (wonderfully self-mythologizing) assurance of that first line—so bold and yet somehow coy, the concision of each line, its understanding of breath and utterance, the tenuousness of the connection from line to line, image to image (though the connections are there). It’s a poem that starts one place and seems to run immediately in every other direction but forward. It’s a poem I have spent decades coming back to, imitating, reminding myself of how to move away from the self into the universe, but always remain in very tactile particulars.
More recently, I’ve been absolutely floored by Ai’s first few books: her ability to inhabit the dramatic first person, the project of exploring history through the voices of its players big (JFK, Joe McCarthy) and small (an anonymous journalist or police officer, a participant in Kristallnacht). She makes each of them intimate, strange, and worthy of our attention. The poems become so much more than a checklist of historical signifiers; they become excavations of the strange particulars of human psychology. They are phenomenal. There’s no going back from them.
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