Regan Good : part one

Regan Good attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and currently teaches writing at the Pratt School of Architecture and Barnard College.  She published her first book, THE ATLANTIC HOUSE, in 2011, and her second, THE NEEDLE, this year.  She lives in Brooklyn.  

Photo credit: Mia Isabella Photography

Poets I learned from:

Dead: All of the dead poets teach us/me, and I am always thinking of them (especially the American poets Dickinson, Frost, Bishop, Stevens, Berryman, Crane, Lowell, Eliot, Moore, Roethke, Whitman, Ashbery).  Yeats was foundational to me, I can’t imagine poetry without him, my middle name is Maud after Maud Gonne because Yeats was my mother’s favorite poet.  Another important influence (though why would any one care?) was Milosz and the book The Bells of Winter.  I also read Anna Akhmatova and Wislawa Szymborska at an important point as well. Rilke, too. Recently Aime Cesaire’s poems have become portals, and also St. Jean Perse’s Chronique taught me something I can’t articulate but I felt it the second I read his work—it’s huge. 

Living: I learned a tremendous amount from Jorie Graham at Iowa; her third book, The End of Beauty was very important to me.  I was saved from a path of perdition in the early 90s by Donald Revell’s work; his book New Dark Ages was a real rock in a ironic ocean.  I did not believe in the ironic style that marked the 90s (but for one or two exceptions), and I was happy to turn away from it.  Jane Mead’s beautiful work was important for that reason, a sane alternative.  Then the work of poet peers who one has known for decades informs one in imperceptible ways.  I recently gave a reading with Geoffrey Nutter and Matt Rohrer and we felt we were in a dream, listening to each other and thinking backward to who we were in 1993 in Iowa City.  A lifetime later and we are still hard at it.