What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Liz Willis was a very influential teacher who opened me up to linguistic abstraction and verbal play. Anselm Berrigan taught me (semi-successfully) to chill out and (more successfully) to “love speech,” or the sublime accumulation of things people say or might say. Ben Lerner, whose poetry I admired before I became his student and assistant for a brief period in my twenties, taught me to how to make conceptual use of invented experimental forms, and also that poetry—for better and for worse—is frequently about using patterns of closure and anti-closure to create a formal and temporal experience (Ben would call this “prosody”) that moves us simply because it seems to do so.
But other poets have taught me that poetry can be pleasurable, formally impactful, mind-bendingly experimental, and committed to more than just an aesthetic experience or diagnosis of the bankruptcy of aestheticism. Claudia Rankine, Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, Juliana Spahr, Rodrigo Toscano, Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, and Mark Nowak are among the more important influences. There are plenty of younger poets writing today about whom I feel similarly. I recently reviewed Wendy Xu’s book The Past, which I think is fantastic. You can find my review in the next issue of Chicago Review.
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