What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
At one point, many of my favorite poets were all old white guys named William: Shakespeare; Blake; Wordsworth; Yeats; Williams; Collins. Throw in more dead white guys: Percy; Edgar; Robert. I was an academic, a student of the Western canon.
The single book that nudged the way I thought about poetry and writing is the anthology The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. I bought it when I discovered it at a bookstore in San Francisco during a work trip in 2003. Nothing in the book was like any poem I had read in any high school or college textbook for any English or poetry class. Reading those poems felt like I had grown up knowing only classical music and was hearing jazz for the first time.
So chronologically, the poets in that anthology changed the way I thought about writing.
Later, I discovered Christian Bök, an exemplar of constrained writing. His book-length poem Eunoia is my absolute favorite poem. How could it not be? My MFA critical thesis, detailing my discovery of conceptual poetry, focused a great deal on Bök and on Kenneth Goldsmith. (This was 2013, years before Goldsmith would deliver his now infamous conceptual reading at Brown University which ironically—and maybe inevitably—turned the author into a lightning rod for disdain of a movement that purports to make an author extraneous.)
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