Going to MFA
school was the first chance I had as an adult to dedicate real study to
writing. My graduate school mentor, Julie Carr, comes immediately to mind as a
poet who taught me about risking something in your writing—risking
vulnerability, leaving necessary space for uncertainty and intuition, which is
another kind of risk or trust. She also taught me that every bit of our living
is political, and you can write a book about that.
I keep learning
from Fred Moten, whose mélange of music, vernacular, high theoretical thinking,
and a deeply candid, personal writing thrills me. Reading Moten feels a lot
more like dancing. I’m always brought back to my own body by Danielle Vogel’s
physical and literal entanglement of ritual and composition. Lisa Robertson
opened up whole new possibilities to me—that my research obsessions are welcome
in any form, that form itself is radically plastic, and that’s the fun of it.
Also, you can ask your reader to be rigorous.
Always: Claudia
Rankine, Anne Carson, Bhanu Kapil, Elizabeth Willis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
Rosmarie Waldrop, Alice Notley. More recently: Farnoosh Fathi, Angel Nafis,
Morgan Parker, Hannah Brooks-Motl.
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