What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Moscow Conceptualism and Charles Reznikoff. When I was in college most of the poets were English majors, but I was a philosophy major. One of my best friends, the poet Phil Metres, also translated Russian and he introduced me to the Moscow Conceptualist poets, Dmitri Prigov and Lev Rubinstein. I was very turned on by this poetry and how little personality there was in it, compared to English and American mainstream contemporary poetry. (In this way it reminded me of the Japanese haiku poets.) They gave me hope there might be this different possibility in poetry, a possibility that I couldn’t even find in my MFA program at Columbia University, where I didn’t exactly fit in. I actually found this other possibility after graduate school on a sign in a NYC subway. It was a Charles Reznikoff poem, “If there is a scheme…”:
If there is a scheme,
perhaps this too is in the scheme,
as when a subway car turns on a switch,
the wheels screeching against the rails,
and the lights go out —
but are on again in a moment.
I read more Reznikoff which led me to the Objectivists like Oppen and Niedecker and then I was off on an alternative path that foregrounded process as much (or more) than product/publication, an off-the-rails path where your lights may go out.
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