What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
I had formative, paradigm-nudging encounters with the work of Sylvia Plath in the eighties, Margaret Avison in the nineties, Stuart Ross in the noughts, to name a few.
In middle age, I think the likelihood diminishes that an aesthetic experience will take your brain completely apart and put it back together again. In Zona, a book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker, Geoff Dyer proposes that this is much less likely to happen to us after the age of thirty, which has generally held true for me (I’m forty-four). For one thing, there are so many more books/movies/albums/etc. already swimming around in memory that it becomes harder for a newcomer to plunge into the pool and dominate. I read a lot of poetry that I love and admire the hell out of, but I’m too old for it to establish itself as a soul-reconfiguring aesthetic touchstone. No skin off its back, of course — plenty of other readers will have that experience with it.
That said, in recent years I have come across some work so striking and distinctive that it has renovated aesthetic regions of my brain. Recent books come to mind by Sina Queyras, Linda Besner, Mikko Harvey, Susan Holbrook, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; I’m sure there have been others.
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