What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Early on, confessional and post-confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Kim Addonizio, Mary Oliver, and Dorianne Laux gave me permission to write about how I experienced the world. Poets who position themselves between narrative and lyric modes continue to teach me how to conceptualize experience and its music: poets like Lynda Hull and Mark Doty, Lee Ann Roripaugh and Larry Levis. Early on, I encountered the metaphysical work of Charles Wright—works from his trilogies like Negative Blue blended place, philosophy, and the self in ways which made the hair on my arms stand on end—but lately, I find myself being shattered in all the best ways by poets engaging with new possibilities for poetic form. Poets like Allison Joseph (My Father’s Kites made me fall in love with the sonnet all over again), Patricia Smith (Blood Dazzler and Incendiary Art are necessary reading), Diane Seuss (frank: sonnets just won the Pulitzer Prize), Danez Smith, and Terrance Hayes (the creator of the golden shovel and whose collection of sonnets, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, is one of the best collections of sonnets published in the twenty-first century) teach me how poetic form—once a gatekeeping device—presents constant possibilities for advocacy, witness, and innovation.
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