Well Bottom Blues

Which poets have the greatest influence on me? Do you mean capital P poet or little p poet, a stylistic division.

Among Poets Garcia-Lorca and Wallace Stsvens stand astride them all. I would not be writing poetry if professor and poet Rayburn Miller had not wopped me upside the head with the Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens as required reading. My foxed firstedituon New Directions selected Lor \, found for a dollar in a used bookshop, was the jumper that hotwired my soul to the piem4 and first taught me the poetics of empathy.

Among the little P poets  Donald Justice hovers at the edge of Poet and poet.  I often write an accentual, stanzaic verse, so I’m not surprised to be drawn to his formal poetics. I think Timothy Donnelly’s “The Cloud Corporation” is “The Wasteland” of our–I hate to say generation; it’s become such a meaningless word–of my cohort. Bukowski’s clever cynicism continues to play well into the 21st century without missing a beat.  Larkin’s proletarian poetics is a fond recent addition to my favorites, and I have a strange attraction to Robinson Jeffers. His Selected Poems, thick as a Norton, is glowering at me from my shelf to remind me to do a deep dive.

I am taking up Carolyn Forché’s torch of poetry of witness to our modern horrors, reading much Palestine poetry and writing about our contemporary horrors. Paisley Rekdal’s WEST: A Translation is leading me back to revise and successfully abandon into the world a long, old poem about the place I’ve lived most of my life. (cf. Jeffers above ). 

I’m reading through the poetry of Luis Alberto Urrea, whose novels and stories and non-fiction I love: a capital little p poet. Essential reading for our time of the alienation of the immigrant, his Tiajuana Book of the Dead as well as his prose. The immigrants stand as the stars in the firmament of the United States, and they are trying to pull the stars down from the sky.

I dearly love Everett Maddox, whom you’ve likely  never heard of, and Bob Kaufman, who you’ve probably forgotten; Maddox for his lyric ntimacy with the dad and uncannym and Kaufman as mad witness to a mad world.  I hope you hear something of this pair of voices in my work, even when I let Stevens bang his magisterial,  contrabiblical drum and Lorca sing backup.