Tommye Blount : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Vievee Francis is always my first answer to this question. A brilliant poet, and also a dear friend, who was my first poetry teacher. Through her example, the mysticism that often gets assigned to poetry was quickly dismantled. Francis taught me that poetry is work, not magic. It demands the same attention as building car engines on a Detroit assembly line—which I have done. This is not to say that there is no play involved, play is so instrumental to my process, but Francis taught that I have to chaperone that play as well.

Carl Phillips’ work was also pivotal to how I came to understand writing poems. Rock Harbor was my introduction to Phillips. Poetry, both its consumption and creation, demand patience—this is true of Carl’s work. There was such an organic connection between the lines of desire and the lines of syntax that just thrilled me to track and parse out in Rock Harbor. Each time he has a new book out, I gobble it up immediately. Before Carl Phillips, I never realized that (absolutely!) poets still work in sentences. Even when the best poets are manipulating traditional sentence constructions—I am thinking of my dear friend and poet francine j. harris now—there is still an awareness of the sentence’s power.

Then, of course, there are Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, and Cave Canem, where I was lucky enough to workshop with so many: Patricia Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips, Erica Hunt, Colleen J. McElroy, Claudia Rankine, Cyrus Cassells, and Ed Roberson. Cave Canem instilled in me the audacity to demand more of my writing, while at the same time affirming that I have the know-how to be capacious and hold space in the larger poetic landscape—one beyond my hometown of Detroit.

Finally, where would I be without my mentors, and friends, who taught me more than poetry at Warren Wilson College: Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Martha Rhodes, A. Van Jordan, and C. Dale Young? Among many lessons under their tutelage, I learned (in actual practice) that my writing life would always be one in which the two (my writing and my life) will forever be inseparable. One territory feeds the other and back again.