Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

When I was 19, my father set me up with a much older man (his college professor actually, who is now a high-profile government actor-- there’s a funny story there I really should write about); we had nothing in common but when he learned I liked writing poetry, he gave me Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I’d never heard of Rilke, and it changed my life.  I had taken a gap year and was floating from one service job to the next.  When I read that famous passage that begins, “Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?” I realized that this is what I was called to; that I had to write.  I re-enrolled in college and started taking creative writing classes.  

Of course, anyone who has read my writing is going to hear echoes of Plath, Sexton, Carter, Atwood—I’m obsessively drawn to retellings of myth and fairy tales.  I love a witty poem, when a poet uses dark humor to engage in conversation with popular culture.  Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife is extraordinary; it’s an entire collection of persona poems told from the perspective of the wives of famous (real and fictional) men. Patricia Smith’s poetry—the rhythm and lyric directness of her lines, the fearlessness of diving into a complicated persona like in her “Skinhead.” Denise Duhamel’s Kinky—love those Barbie poems, such a superb blend of sarcasm and sorrow. The Adam & Eve poems of Eavan Boland, Ansel Elkins, Danusha Lameris…. How one figure from history/myth can be imagined in so many ways, all those representations in conversation with each other. And then there’s the lightness of poets like my friend Melissa Balmain whose The Witch Demands a Retraction is just so fun. Melissa writes almost exclusively in form; we had lunch a few week ago and since then I’ve been trying my hand at more sonnets, sestinas, etc. The inventiveness of Terrance Hayes (his golden shovel poems) and Tony Leuzzi (his zipcode poems) inspired me to come up with a new form for my current project.Ta’I Freedom Ford’s How to Get Over, blew me away; Tyehimba Jess (also fantastic) praised its “boomboxed declaration of living filled with all the grit and spit”—and I’m not sure there’s a better way to characterize these poems.  To write with bombast, to be so direct and vulnerable and simultaneously unapologetic—that’s what I want for my writing, too.  When I read it, I knew I wanted to write my own unadulterated version of “How To Get Over”—which is how I wound up writing “The 10 Commandments of Loving a Recovering Evangelical.”