What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Rosebud Ben-Oni and Diana Khoi Nguyen have pushed me in workshops to expand my work beyond my comfort zone, finding better phrasing and form. Their written collections If This is the Age We End Discovery and Ghost Of are so powerful, experimental and raw. I am also always learning from my friends who share their poems with me in workshops or in our exchanges. Teresa Dzieglewicz, who was in my class with Rosebud, has a way of thinking about very large things through her speakers’ everyday lives that I’ve learned from a lot. In my reading, no one has startled me in a more positive way than Diane Seuss and Jennifer Knox. I will read their work and often say aloud, “oh, we can do that?!” They are so refreshing in their fearlessness. That Seuss continues to do this in every imaginable way through sonnet memoirs or startling ekphrasis or a gritty free verse poem is just amazing.
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