What poets changed the way you think about writing?
Raymond Carver taught me the pleasure of a poet’s voice that feels like it is in the room with you, leveling with you, speaking openly as if to a close friend. His poetry is highly underrated in relation to his fiction.
Linda Pastan is a master of controlling and addressing the movement of time. Her poems manage to evoke aging and change in such a compressed space. It makes her poems feel large and adds a gravitas. It makes them hard to forget.
Robert Bly, not so much for his own poetry, though I do love it; his translations introduced me to Transtromer, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, and other poets of the broader world.
James Wright is a pillar for me. Who else? Cornelius Eady, Frank Stanford, James Wright. Ginsberg. Audre Lorde. My friend Michael Meyerhofer. Adrian Matejka. David Lee. Doriane Laux. Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg.
I fall in love with poets and books; so much of what I read ends up changing the way I think about writing, at least for a while. Then the next obsession comes along and alters that a bit. I like that there’s always another poet to discover.
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