Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began? And What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
I'd been writing poetry for a few years, had a couple of pieces published in journals and was really getting into doing readings, before I encountered Doug Barbour and through him the world of sound poetry. As a young poet I was so pleased with my developing ability to craft nifty little lyric poetry with the occasional semi-original image that I completely ignored the pure sonic pleasure of language as a thing that can happily exist completely separate from any sense of "meaning." Reading Doug, or better yet, listening to Doug, encouraged me to pay as much attention to the physical sound of the words I was writing as the meaning. He also drilled into my head a healthy suspicion of the weakness of simile to the point where I sometimes have to force myself to use the word "like" in a poem ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment