What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
When I was in high school and college, I loved T.S. Eliot (and I still do; poetry often begins and ends in Eliot for me). I admired his intellectualism, his blending of references and allusions, his lovely lines, etc. He still has the power to move me unlike almost any other. Before I encountered “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets”, I didn’t know one could be so moved by experience and faith and, in many cases, the mind. And then came e.e. cummings whose beautiful abstractions continue to haunt me. But since then I’ve turned to other poets for various other reasons; W.S. Merwin is a recent influence—his sheer beauty and ability to say something so simply but reach toward the divine is incredible. I also love how he crafts his lines; he eschews punctuation and lets the line/ line breaks do a lot of the work. And he’s a virtuoso of rhythm. Language, in Merwin’s hands, is born anew.
Rilke’s simplicity is increasingly becoming an influence, too, and I’m intrigued by the ways that he blends spirituality with simple diction. His poems are often short, too and this is something I want to work on.
But I also love and admire Gwendolyn Brooks, Eavan Boland, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. They render women’s experiences in everyday vernacular (though Millay and Brooks often turn to sonnets/rhyme/forms) that is so powerful and important. There’s something about the way these women blend memory and the everyday, the mundane and the ethereal, that invites me to visit their work again and again. And lately I have turned to Jorie Graham for the way she manages to walk the precarious line between abstract and concrete, and yet somehow remains so accessible.
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