Benjamin Niespodziany : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

To make this list would be a massive undertaking. If a writer is on their A game - if a book is really captivating me - then the lines and paragraphs are steadily changing the way I think about writing. This happens to me every week. Every week I learn a new way to approach a poem or a new technique or a new trick just by reading more than I write. That being said, the one's who made me throw my hands in the air, burn my manuscript, and realize anything was possible on the page?

Eric Baus. He has a poetry collection called The Tranquilized Tongue where every line starts with 'The'. 

C. Dylan Bassett. He has a book of one-act plays called The Invention of Monsters where each piece is titled [scene] yet it'd be nearly impossible to adapt a single one of them onto the stage.

Joanna Ruocco. Some may say she only writes prose but oh no, she is a poet. Her lines. Her lines. Every damn line. 

CAConrad. Have you read CAConrad? My god.

Fiston Mwanza Mujila. Perhaps the most musical poet I've encountered, where jazz bleeds on the page. Psychedelia and surrealism frequent the page and jazz, jazz, jazz runs rampant. His poetry collection The River in the Belly is the wildest poetry collection you haven't read, and his novella Tram 83 is still rattling in my brain. The late night jazz, the grass, the mines. He has another novel out called The Villain's Dance (2020), I'm just waiting (impatiently) on the English translation to be released. 

Zachary Schomburg and Mathias Svalina. I'm going to clump these two together like I would James Tate and Charles Simic, not only because I started reading them at the same time but because it was my first time finding story inside of poetry. A paragraph with captured tale. A prose poem tiptoeing in dreamland. Richard Brautigan introduced this sideways world to me, but Schomburg and Svalina crystallized it, pumped it full of more heart and more darkness and more sorrow and more loneliness and more joy and more beauty. I consider these two my poetry father and mother. You can decide which is which.