What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Bill Matthews was my professor at City College in the late 1990s. I applied to City College because I loved his poetry. However, I found a brilliant teacher, too. His vocabulary and knowledge of literature blew me away. He taught me that writing was not just throwing it up on the paper, but being well read was equally important. I had that creative spirit in my poetry, but without the analytical ability of a well-read mind to craft it, the poem was limited in its reach. As my reading grew, I built a toolbox of resources I could use to connect more events, people, stories, images, and vocabulary within my poems.
At our first class, Bill referenced at least twenty major works, which made me realize the extent of my literary ignorance. So, after that workshop, I set a goal to read fifty books a year. My library card melted. I read classic novels from Middlemarch to Anna Karenina and poets from John Donne and Phillis Wheatley to Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. Any writer he mentioned in my classes, I checked out their books from the library.
I not only read to expand my vocabulary but to discover poets who resonated with my way of writing and made me feel less alone in the world. Poets like Bill Matthews, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and Richard Wilbur taught me how to accurately describe images and address the more difficult subject matter I wrote about.
No comments:
Post a Comment