What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Earlier this year, I read about a sociologist who had managed to walk the length of every street in New York before his death. All five boroughs. Imagine spending a day perched in his ear, how syntactically complex that would be. In metrical terms, this is a trochee cab-hailing town. Queens is anapestic. Staten Island substitutes. Iambs live on the Upper East Side, but who goes there. I think back to F.R. Leavis in The Common Pursuit and elsewhere, his sense of an undercurrent in English poetry that emulates the strangeness, the roughness, of our language as it’s talked: Shakespeare’s “full fathom five,” Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm,” Eliot’s pub-talk about how “Lil’s husband got demobbed.” Those poets who influence my thinking about writing help me translate between the poem-as-occasion and how I talk and what I hear talked. Elizabethans, Jacobeans, Metaphysical Poets. Sir Philip Sidney pushing quantitative meter. I want to hear Method Man reading Astrophil and Stella on the Staten Island Ferry. Richard Howard’s syllabic poems do this for me at a slyer pace. Meghan Maguire Dahn. There are turns in Lucie Brock-Broido, when she talks you “a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit,” for example, that inflect this. Roger Reeves. Melissa Green’s Fifty-Two has what I want in a sequence of broken paragraphs. Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, his “Overlord of the M5.” I can hear it in the cadence of Timothy Donnelly reading Timothy Donnelly at an accelerated rate. I can see it in Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno at mine. The prologue to Langland’s Piers Plowman. Asturo Riley’s Heard-Hoard and “Chord.”
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