What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
WCW. Ezra Pound. WWE Ross. Raymond Knister. Shakespeare. Camus. Browning. Blake. Melville. Robert Creeley. Keats. Olson. Coleridge. Daphne Marlatt. Villon. Rimbaud. Bob Dylan. Sharon Dubiago. Chaucer. Powwow singers. James Agee. Wallace Stevens. Robert Johnson. Memphis Minnie. Phyllis Webb. John Newlove. Lorca. Basil Bunting. Lao-Tzu. Frank Davey. Michael Ondaatje. DH Lawrence. Ron Hansen. Pessoa. ee cummings.
A couple like Camus and Hansen are not per se poets, but still. Ron Hansen’s novel about Jesse James is a prose epic, with poetic style. Bob Hogg was my most important mentor. I mention him here, above, in the first question. He introduced me to the work of WCW, EP, the Black Mountain poets, Daphne Marlatt, the TISH poets, and Basil. In fact, Bob introduced me to Basil himself when he came to Ottawa for a reading. We went to dinner later, an unforgettable evening. Basil told me, to the effect: “When you write a poem, put it in a drawer for a year, if you can still read it then without wincing, go ahead and publish it.” Every poem in my new book, Polyphonic Lyre, has been in the drawer for at least a year, some for several. George Bowering taught a class at SFU in Vancouver in which we read modern and contemporary Canadian poets in depth. No one in Canada should receive a degree in English without having taken Bob and George’s classes. Those seminars were utterly invaluable to me as a writer. What they taught, and their own examples, and their unabashed Canadian perspective without being rah-rah nationalistic, pointed the way.
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