Bruce Whiteman : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Oh yes. There are a lot of poems I read and re-read, that are like emotional support animals. Given that my poetic roots are in Anglo-American modernism, I often go back to Yeats and Stevens and Williams. Poems like “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Lapus Lazuli,” much of Pictures from Brueghel and Spring & All, boost me up and renew my faith in poetry. Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts is another example, and many of Creeley’s poems, especially the early ones. These are all poems with an intense sense of music, a quality that I aspire to in my own poems.