What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Many have, but I remember in particular having a revelation after reading a lot of Wallace Stevens for the first time. It’s hard to read a lot of Stevens and not come away feeling that a lot of the time he really is just playing—I think I said something to myself along the lines of “He’s just making things up!” And that was incredibly liberating, the idea that you could just make things up, just play. This seems obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious to me when I was 20. I had this very unhelpful idea, which I think I got from misreading Eliot, that to write a really good poem you had to know beforehand what the shape of it was, and what you were aiming at—when you wrote something down, you had to already have a sense of how it fit into an architecture that you had already pre-drafted in your head. I could almost never do this (obviously), so I rarely wrote, and when I did, I found it very stressful, because in order to get anything done I had to (of course) just make things up, which felt like “cheating”—how could the poem “mean” anything, if I wasn’t sure what I was doing when I wrote the words? If anything, I’ve since moved closer to the opposite extreme; if you ask me what one of my poems “mean,” I’ll certainly have things to say, but I’ll come to those conclusions just like anyone else would—by reading the poem and thinking about it. I don’t think much at all (at least not consciously) about what my poems mean as I’m writing them, and certainly not before. Which doesn’t, I hope, prevent them from meaning a great deal (or having the capacity to generate meanings, which amounts to the same thing).
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