What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
I’m going to interpret “changed” to include “allowed to begin again.” After busy decades of full-time work and parenting, I went through some life changes and emotional upheavals when I hit the empty-nest phase, and I began putting those upheavals on paper. At the same moment, I met a real poet, Anna George Meek, and had many opportunities to talk with her about poetry. And I discovered online poetry communities and online journals, and those supplied the support and the awareness of an audience that fired me to write again. I also began, barely, to catch up with the years of contemporary poetry I’d been missing.
I worked with as many as seven online poetry forums in those early years, and I owe them all; I’ll mention in particular The Gazebo and The Waters. But my greatest debt is to Eratosphere, and especially to the formal poets who frequented that forum from about 2006 to 2011. Their discussions of midcentury poets like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and W.D. Snodgrass persuaded me that I wasn’t crazy to prefer rhyme and meter. I’ll always be grateful to the late Timothy Murphy for his early encouragement.
I’m still in touch with most of my poetry-board contacts in various social-media ways. Poets I met on those boards and am still reading include A.E. Stallings, Aaron Poochigian, Rhina P. Espaillat, Susan McLean, Catherine Tufariello, A.M. Juster, R.S. Gwynn, and Wendy Videlock. And maybe I should stop there, apologizing that in my forgetfulness I’m leaving out dozens of people . . .
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