What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
There are several writers or historical moments that completely altered my ideas about poetry. John Ashbery weaned me from some fairly staid, morally upright modernist fare and felt immensely permissive. bpNichol always brings me back to basics, to the level of the letter. I think that he taught me how to really look at poems, rather than greedily reading as if to paraphrase. Elizabeth Smart more so than any polemicist affirmed for me that the writer must be fanatical in some respect, and when I encountered New Narrative I felt a similar affinity. The Kootenay School of Writing really lit a fire under my ass—it had that para-academic precocity that one associates with Language poetry but felt unaffiliated, rough-shod, DIY, more rebellious than scholastic. I related it immediately to punk, which was something I knew how to do.
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