Contemporary American Poets and Their Literary Influences
General
Resources:
Background Article in the Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since World War II (Sixth Series) Conte, Joseph, Ed., Detroit: Gale Research Press, 1998. 20th C American Poetry - An Overview
Major movements and schools of 20th century American poetry
popular modernism | high modernism | objectivist poetics | Harlem Renaissance | formalist poets | confessional poetry |the Black Mountain poets |Beats and San Francisco Renaissance | the New York School | L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry | "deep image"- neo-surrealist poetry | projectivism | The Black Arts Movement | Expansive/Neo-formalist poetry |new narrative poetry| ecopoetry
Related Resources:Confessional Poetry see: Middlebrook, Diane Wood. What was Confessional Poetry?. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
"Deep Image" Poetry see: Selections from Robert Bly, Leaping Poetry an Idea with Poems and Translations. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.
Haskell, Dennis. "The Modern American Poetry of Deep Image." Southern Review [Australia] 12 (1979): 137-166.
The Poets of the New York School by John Bernard Myers (Philadelphia: The University
of Pennsylvania, 1969
NOTE: Poets listed alphabetically in UPPER CASE / blue font pared with their influences below in lower case / red font. Follow links to biographical information, interviews, and work for each poet. There are those poets in UPPER CASE / blue font for whom there is no influence indicated. If you wish to conduct research on one of these poets and an influence you can identify, please feel free to do so. This list is continually under construction, and, while not exhaustive, was designed for you in part to prevent you from having to 'prove' the question of influence. However, the parings are merely suggestive; you may wish to explore other possibilities and are welcome to do so.
LIST OF POETS ALPHABETICALLY:
AI (b. 1947)
"I don't feel very comfortable assessing my own work. And I don't feel
very knowledgeable about contemporary American poetry. My tastes run to older poets'
work, poets like Galway, Kinnell and Phil Levine. Randall Jarrell. I love
Cesare Pavese's poetry. I loved The Lice by Merwin when it first came out. I
like Gerald Stern's work, and of course, Louis Simpson's. Honestly, there are
very few of my contemporaries whose work I admire or feel inspired by—I really
like Steve Orien's poetry and Jon Anderson's and Norman Dubie's. There is an
obvious kinship, I believe, between Dubie's work and mine. . . . My favorite
poet for a long time has been Jean Follain, whose work is totally different
from mine. The list goes on and on." Ai Interviewed by Lawrence Kearney
and Michael Cuddihy, first published in Ironwood
12 6, no. 2 (1978)
Kim Addonizio
It was Sharon Olds that I really learned from in that way. She was
somebody who was pushing a lot of boundaries about things, things that could be
said in poems because she said them, and that was very liberating.
Walt Whitman has been a big and sustaining influence…(read more of interview
conducted by Kevin Feeney)
SHERMAN ALEXIE
(b.
1966)
Walt Whitman (b. 1819)
Emily Dickinson (b. 1830)
In
an interview, Sherman Alexie was asked: "The poetry that you would have
studied in American Studies, for instance, the poetry of Wallace Stevens or
e.e. cummings or Emily Dickinson never influenced you at all?" He
responded: "Of course it did. I loved that stuff. I still love it. Walt
Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two of my favorites . . . they're still a
primary influence. I always tell people my literary influences are Stephen
King, John Steinbeck, and my mother, my grandfather and the Brady Bunch."
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
JOHN ASHBERY (recipient of the 2001 Wallace Stevens Award) (see also the New York
School)
Wallace Stevens (b. 1879)
Ashbery's
subject matter is similar to that of his favorite poet, Wallace Stevens. Both
poets write of the mind forming hypotheses about reality in general, about the
ultimate truth or nature of things. Stevens, as I said earlier, took for
granted that we cannot know reality in itself. Whether we conceive of it as a
colorless, featureless continuum, like gray haze on a winter afternoon, or as a
"jostling festival" of concrete, particular identities, like a
morning in June full of birdsong, we are in either case forming an imagination
of reality. … (David Perkins (1987): "On Ashbery's Predecessors: Stevens,
Eliot and Pound")
As
John Ashbery describes in Other Traditions :"In
addition to the poets one has at times been influenced by, there is also a much
smaller group whom one reads habitually in order to get started; a poetic jump
start for times when the batteries run down." He goes on the mention the
major poets Holderlin, Auden, Moore, Stein, Bishop, Stevens, Williams,
Pasternak and Mandelstam, but chooses to write about five lesser known writers,
his "other tradition" of writers who have helped him at one time or
another:Clare, Beddoes, Roussel, Wheelwright, Riding and David Schubert. The
group is decidedly, as he says, a "mixed bag" and all the better-- a
kind of cross fertilization takes place in such circumstances. "Without
contraries is no progression," wrote Blake. As Charles Simic says in A Fly
In The Soup:"I liked so many different kinds of poetry. One month I was a
disciple of Hart Crane; the next month only Walt Whitman existed for me."
Simic goes on to say:"I am only mildly exaggerating when I say that I
couldn't take a piss without a book in my hand. I read to fall asleep and to
wake up. I read everything from Plato to Mickey Spillane. Even in my open
coffin, some day, I should be holding a book. The Tibetan Book of the Dead
would be most appropriate, but I'd prefer a sex manual or the poems of Emily
Dickinson." One only has to look at the poems of Yugoslav poet Vasko Popa
to see the profound and lasting influence that he has had on Simic himself
whose object and mythic poems rely on but also transform the work of
Popa." (from Dancing as if Free: Reading, Imitation and Influence by Richard
Jackson)
"[Simic] readily admits the importance of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore,
Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, and more surprisingly William Carlos
Williams, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam." (The New York Review of
Books November 30, 2000)
A.R. AMMONS (b. 1926) (also
see ecopoetry)
Robert Frost (b. 1874)
"The
critic Harold Bloom has championed Ammons as a transcendentalist, 'the most
direct Emersonian in American poetry since Frost'. Like Frost, Ammons loves
nature too deeply to sentimentalize it or flinch in the face of its cruelties.
But he is warmer; where Frost is a poet of terror, Ammons would convert fear
into praise. He aspires, as he writes in the, 'The City Limits', to a
transcendent 'radiance' that illuminates equally a sublime landscape or the
scene of a natural slaughter." (from
Archie: A Profile of A. R. Ammons by David Lehman)
Bruce Andrews (see also L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry)
JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA
Pablo Neruda
William Carlos Williams
Walt Whitman
Octavio Paz
As
a poet, Baca is often compared to Pablo Neruda. The great Chilean poet was
certainly one of Baca's earliest and most profound influences. "It was his
enthusiasm for language," Baca says, "and it didn't come from a text
book. He was celebrating nature like Jim Harrison does in his fiction. I like
that a lot." Baca's other poetic influences come from far and wide. He
names everyone from William Carlos Williams to Walt Whitman to Rilke to Black
Elk to Octavio Paz as major influences. (From the Inside Out : An Interview
with Jimmy Santiago Baca By Steven Robert Allen at Alibi)
Mary Jo Bang
AMIRI BARAKA (LEROI JONES) (b.
1934)
Charles Olson (b. 1910)
Frank O'Hara (b. 1926)
Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
"Baraka
was greatly influenced by the white avant-garde: Charles Olson, O'Hara, and
Ginsberg, in particular, shaped his conception of a poem as being exploratory
and open in form. Donald Allen records in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 Baraka's
Beat-period views on form: 'there must not be any preconceived notion or design
for what a poem ought to be. 'Who knows what a poem ought to sound like? Until
it's thar' say Charles Olson . . . & I follow closely with that. I'm not
interested in writing sonnets, sestinas or anything . . . only poems.'"
(from the "Introduction," to The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader
[1991] by William J. Harris)
PAUL BEATTY
Calvin Bedient
MARVIN BELL
Williams Carlos Williams (b. 1883)
Walt Whitman (b. 1819)
Pablo Neruda (1904)
"Marvin
Bell once said that you should try to write a poem that doesn't sound like a
poem, which means we have to cast off our influences, to read not to imitate or
to copy, but to transform, to make new. Just think of what he has done to
Williams, such a powerful and important influence on his own work, how he has
transformed Williams vision of the line especially in his "Dead Man" poems. I suppose the
point of reading is a sort of intellectual osmosis where the mind absorbs the past
only enough to forget it as it was and so to create something new. We don't
grow by watching the marks and numbers our parents draw on the door frame; we
grow by growing where we have to grow." (from Dancing As If Free: Reading, Imitation and Influence by Richard
Jackson)
When asked who are some of his primary poetic influences, Marvin Bell
responded: "The list of poets is long and includes Whitman, William Carlos
Williams, Neruda, and two dozen American poets from the generation ahead of
mine." (4 Better or 4 Words.com interview)
WENDELL BERRY (b. 1934) (also see ecopoetry)
Although the source of Berry's writing is clear by simply reading his
writing, the influences on his style may not be. His earliest introduction to
literature cane from his mother. She would read to him as a child and helped
young Berry develop an appreciation for books (Angyal 7). He recalls, "To
be sick and home from school and feeling well enough to listen was an excellent
pleasure, because she would read to me" (Weinreb 40). Berry remembers
reading Swiss Family Robinson as a boy, along with Mark Twain, and Mary O'Hara.
He also names Shakespeare, Jane Austin, and Thoreau as authors that he studied
in school (40). However, Berry continues by saying, "I'm wary of trying to
deal with the issue of literary influences, because of my fear that I won't
remember them all and my suspicion that don't even know them all" (40).
(excerpt Wendell
Berry - 1934 By Karen Oppito)
JOHN
BERRYMAN (b.
1914)
[Berryman's] early work was published in a volume entitled Five Young
American Poets in 1940 and reflects the influences of the British poets W. B.
Yeats, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the Americans Hart Crane and Ezra
Pound. (The Academy of American Poets Bio)
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Robert Lowell
George Herbert
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Pablo Neruda
"Though
Lowell repeatedly confessed his debt to Bishop's poetry, her debt to his is
less well known. For Bishop, Lowell represented the quintessential American:
male and historically significant. Indeed, he became her "other."
Even as Questions of Travel seems a reply to Lowell's earlier Life Studies,
Geography III seems unimaginable without Lowell's struggle to place life at the
center of the lyric."
"Poets as diverse as George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emerson,
Thoreau, and Neruda greatly influenced Bishop's early work." (excerpt
from The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th Ed.)
ROBERT BLY (b. 1926) (also
see "deep
image"- neo-surrealist poetry)
Eavan
Boland (also see Contemporary Irish
Poetry)
Sylvia
Plath
AllenRandolph: After the 1960s,
you married, went to live in the suburbs outside Dublin, and your poetry began
turning in a different direction. This brings us into the early 1970s and I'm
interested in what you were reading, especially the work of Sylvia Plath. Was
she important to you at that time?
Boland: Yes,
but no so clearly as later. She was important in different ways at different
times. I was twenty when I first heard about her. She'd been dead about a year
then. I was a student, very unprepared for the world I was about to find. She
became linked to my sense of that world, sometimes an influence, sometimes a
counter-image. So my first contact with her work was well before the time you
mention." (excerpted from "A Backward Look:
An interview with Eavan Boland" by Jody AllenRandolph in Colby Quarterly,
special issue on Eavan Boland, December 1999)
Also see Boland's -- Letter to a Young Woman Poet" where she envisions the
future dynamics of literary influence and communion among women in the book By
Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. (see me for a copy of this article)
PHILIP BOOTH (b. 1925)
JOSEPH BRODSKY (b. 1940)
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
(Brooks' life
and career / Online
Interviews / About the Black
Arts Movement)
Langston Hughes (b. 1902)
Countee Cullen (b. 1903)
Walt Whitman (b. 1819)
Emily Dickinson (b. 1830)
Paul Laurence Dunbar (b. 1872)
In
an interview for The
Booklist with Hazel Rochman (The
Booklist. v90n4 Oct 15, 1993. p.426-427), Putlitzer Prize-winning
poet Gwendolyn Brooks discusses her early influences and her friendship with
poet Langston Hughes.
The Oxford Companion to
African-American Literature's introduction to Brooks' poetry
states: "Trying to determine clear lines of influence from the work of
earlier writers to later ones is always a risky business; however, knowing some
identifiable poetic traditions can aid in understanding the work of Gwendolyn
Brooks. On one level there is the English metaphysical tradition perhaps best
exemplified by John Donne. From nineteenth-century American poetry one can
detect elements of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
From twentieth century American poetry there are many strains, most notably the
compact style of T S. Eliot, the frequent use of the lower-case for titles in
the manner of e. e. cummings, and the racial consciousness of the Harlem
Renaissance, especially as found in the work of Countee Cullen and Langston
Hughes; but, of perhaps greater importance, she seems to be a direct descendant
of the urban commitment and attitude of the "Chicago School' of writing.
For Brooks, setting goes beyond the Midwest with a focus on Chicago and
concentrates on a small neglected comer of the city. Consequently, in the final
analysis, she is not a carbon copy of any of the Chicago writers."
Finely
crafted, influenced by Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and
Robert Frost—and later by the 1960s Black Arts movement, Brooks’s poetry was
always a social act. A Street in Bronzeville addresses the realities of
segregation for black Americans at home and in World War II military service; Annie
Allen ironically explores post-war anti-romanticism. Maud Martha,
her prose masterpiece, sketches a bildungsroman of black womanhood; The Bean
Eaters and later poems sound the urgencies of the Civil Rights movement. In
1967 she attended the Second Fisk University Writers’ Conference and was deeply
impressed with the activism of Amiri Baraka. Subsequently, although she had
always experimented with various forms, her work opened more distinctly to free
verse, a notable feature of In the Mecca (1968), the book published the
year she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois. (Brooks
Textbook Site for The Heath Anthology of American Literature)
OLGA
BROUMAS
Sophie Cabot Black
Lorna Dee Cervantes
LUCILLE CLIFTON (b. 1936)
MARILYN CHIN (b. 1955)
BILLY COLLINS (b. 1941)
e.e. cummings (b. 1894)
Wallace Stevens (b. 1879)
Hart Crane (b. 1899)
"Collins'
influences range from Ferlinghetti and cummings to Stevens, Hart Crane and
Ginsberg, and his teenage jottings mimicked these writers' erudition and
complex verse. "I thought to be a poet you had to speak in code. It was
like verbal knitting." (Gautam Naik, "Billy
Collins: a blue jeans kinda style" in Magma 14)
AV: You
mention Coleridge.
In other interviews, you've talked about how reading Keats played a
pivotal role in the maturation of your poetic style and how the Beats were an
important influence earlier in your career. Could you talk a little bit about
these influences and who you are reading now?
COLLINS: Influence
is always a looming question for me. Danilo Kis said that when we ask a writer
about his influences, we are treating him like an infant in a basket abandoned
on the front steps of a convent. We want to know who his parents are. I think
if any writer was aware of all of his influences, he would be like the
centipede who fell over when he started thinking about how his hundred legs
were able to move at the same time. The knowledge would be paralyzing. Also,
talk of influences tends to be unreliable, because we tend to invent our
influences, just as we invent our parents at some point in our lives. Our
entire past. But there are moments. I was a most impressionable teenager back
in the days of Beatnik glory, so I responded fully to Kerouac, Ginsberg,
Ferlinghetti's "Coney Island of the Mind"-still a good title-Gregory
Corso and others. I was in Paris for a summer in the early sixties and hung
self-consciously around the corners of the scene on the Boul Mich, as they
called it. I sat at the same table with Corso and others, and I even hung
around with an American girl named Ann Campbell, whom Realities magazine had
called "The Queen of the Beatniks." (Let's see...what did that make
me??) But mostly I was a Catholic high school boy in the suburbs who fantasized
about stealing a car and driving non-stop to Denver. I probably would have done
it, but I didn't have access to those special driving pills Neal Cassady had.
Plus, there was always a test to study for, or band practice. [...] A more
helpful influence came in the form of a little Penguin paperback-which I still
have-called The New Poetry. It was edited by A. Alvarez and was my first exposure
to poets like Thom
Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson and others.
I carried this book with me everywhere I went in high school. I loved the
clarity and the irony and the mostly simple language. Lines like:
The wind blew all my
wedding-day,
And my wedding night was the night of the high wind
I didn't know if Larkin was kidding or not, and that's just the way I wanted to
keep it. I would say something like that is the ideal tone for me in my poems,
a tone that would be perfectly balanced between feeling and irony. Very
difficult to do. Because it's so easy to fall into one extreme or the other and
write a poem that is sappy or too cute or hard-boiled. In that same little book
was Lowell's naked poetry, and Thom Gunn, who wrote poems about bikers and
Elvis Presley. I was listening to Elvis around the clock, but I never knew you
could write poems about him. I was the prisoner of an older decorum, and these
poets showed me the way out. (continued at terraincognita.com...full text article)
Paris Review,
Fall2001, Vol. 43 Issue 159, p182, 33p, 2bw
George Pinmpton interviews poet Billy Collins.
Inspiration for writing the first line of a poem; Anecdotes about growing up
and family life; Literary influences; Literary style, influences and
themes; Comments on other poets...
Henri Cole
JANE COOPER (b. 1924)
ROBERT CREELEY (b. 1926) (see
also the
Black Mountain poets)
VICTOR HERNANDEZ CRUZ (b. 1949)
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING (b. 1946)
TOI DERRICOTTE (b. 1941)
W.S. DI PIERO (b. 1945)
JAMES DICKEY (b. 1923)
RITA DOVE (1952- )
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892)
Q: Who are your favorite poets? And who has been an influence on your work?
A: I wonder why people always want to know that. My favorite poets may not be
your bread and butter. Also, I have more favorite poems than favorite
poets...Langston Hughes: A
Theme for English B... Cavafy's Marc
Anthony Leaving Alexandra... I don't know why, but those poems
change my life every time I read them. My early influences were Shakespeare,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Heine... and Mother Goose. For each stage of life,
there are groups of poets --- the list is too long!
STEVEN DOBYNS (b. 1941)
MARK DOTY (b. 1953)
Christopher
Hennessy: Speaking
of Whitman, he seems to be one of the strongest influences I hear, but I also
hear Bishop, and not exclusively in Source.
Mark
Doty: I
have been educated by Bishop in profound ways. I read her first in the early
70s, and didn't get it; I'd been schooled on the flamboyant intensities of
neo-surrealism, and thus I found her poems cold and hard to get at. I read her
again in the late 70s and my perspective shifted to allow me to appreciate her
precise and evocative detail. But it wasn't until the late 80s and early 90s
that I found myself drawn to her way of revealing the self by
means of the "how" of seeing; the character of the perceiver was made
available to us through the way in which attention was paid, through the
choices by which attention made itself felt through language. There's an
epistemological project there: We know her by virtue of how she knows. Perhaps
the suggestion is that this is what poetry can give us -- knowledge in context,
historical, specific, the self caught in the act of knowing. I don't believe
we should go in fear of influence. The fact is that poetry never exists in a
vacuum; it's written in dialogue with other poems, part of a vast web of
utterance and response and further response. Each of my books seems to me to be
animated, in part, by a conversation with another poet or poets. My Alexandria
speaks, of course, to Cavafy, but it also very much involved with Rilke and
with Robert Lowell. Hart
Crane and James Merrill are present in Atlantis, too, but nowhere near the
extent that their stylistic characters are engaged in Sweet Machine. That book
is a broader and more inclusive book than itspredecessor, and concerned -- on a
formal level -- with intensification of the verbal surface, which becomes
increasingly wrought, more assertively musical than in previous books. At the
core of it is an argument about art, about the power of what we make, which
both distinguishes us as human and threatens to be the agent of our damnation.
Those two powerful ghosts are tutors of both formal complexity and emotional
nuance. There are shadow presences of other poets here as well -- my late
friend Lynda Hull (in "Murano" and "Emerald"), Jorie Graham
(in "Lilies in NYC") and Stevens (in "Dickeyville Grotto"),
and I'msure others I'm not thinking of at the moment. I guess I think of a book
as a kind of arena of response. (An Interview
with Mark Doty, Lambda Book Report; June-July 2002, v.10, 11, 12(5))
ALAN
DUGAN (b.
1923)
ROBERT
DUNCAN (see
also the
Black Mountain poets)
The most
influential and groundbreaking responses to H.D. tend to emanate either from
poets or from critics who operate on the margins of criticism. One thinks of
Robert Duncan's 'The H.D. Book' (Coyote's Journal, 8 (1967) … Duncan's presence
is a powerful one in this collection attesting to his role as one of H.D.'s
most passionate supporters)” (from H.D. & Poets
After)
DENISE DUHAMEL (1961)
Frank O'Hara (1926)
the New York School poets
James
Schuyler
Explaining
her writing influences, such as John Ashbery and O'Hara, Duhamel, who herself
has had four works included in the prestigious Best American Poetry series,
says: "I am interested in the New York School poets. I'm drawn to their
openness to language play and their daring to expand the boundaries of what a
poem is. For many years I was interested in the confessional' or personal or
anecdotal poem. I still enjoy reading those kinds of poems, but now I feel, in
my own work, that sort of poem has run its course. I really like the third
generation of the New York School poets (I think we're up to the third
generation by now!) -- Nin Andrews and David Trinidad, in particular."
("Alive Poet Society :Denise Duhamel" by Robin Shear for Miami New
Times
excerpt from Interview
With David Trinidad (Reprinted from The Anthologist Fall 1998)
Trinidad: What are your
influences?
Duhamel: Anais Nin was my first literary hero. I
loved her diaries, simply devoured them. Then came Sexton, Plath, and Wakoski.
I liked Ted Hughes, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Denise Levertov, Allen
Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop. On my twentieth Birthday, my roommate gave me a
copy of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, and that influenced me profoundly. I've
always been influenced by my friends, work. In College, I was close to the poet
Rachel Sherwood, was devastated when she was killed in a car accident. Later, I
became friends with Dennis Cooper and Amy Grestler. I love their poems. Dennis
introduced me to the work of James Schuyler. Schuyler, like O'Hara, was a
profound influence. Years afterward, Schuyler and I became friends, which was
wonderful. Other poets who have meant a lot to me include Tim Dlugos, Elaine
Equi, Joe Brainard and Alice Notely.
Queen
for a Day
is exuberant, brazen, bold, honest as hell, audaciously unpretentious, and
outrageously self-referential, a Frank O'Hara meets Lucille Ball meets
Sarah Bernhard of a book: sin verguenza!"— Dorianne Laux
“You've
mentioned that it's important to acknowledge one's influences, and that your
influences include Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Ai, Sylvia Plath, and Jayne
Cortez.” Denise Duhamel Interviewed
by RSP Editor Jalina Mhyana
STEPHEN DUNN (b.1939)
Robert Frost (b. 1874)
Theodore Roethke (b. 1908)
Wallace Stevens (b. 1879)
"What
sets Dunn apart from many others in the poetry mill is his keen ability to draw
on his natural surroundings to explain the human condition. Examples of this
mode of expression can be found in the poetry of Robert Frost, who Dunn counts
among his early influences, along with Theodore Roethke and Wallace
Stevens." (Amy Smith, The Austin Chronicle)
As to other poetic influences, Dunn is not quite sure whether he is still
influenced by other poets in ways that impact his work. There are certainly a
host of poets he admires and reads. Among them are Whitman and Dickinson (poets
who "follow their own dictates, stay the course against the
current"), and Frost ("Once I learned that he was essentially a
philosophical poet. I'd read him for his narrative tactics as well."). One
might naturally think of, given his roots in New Jersey and the affinity with
William Carlos Williams and Paterson, New Jersey, along with Paterson, the
poem, that place might serve as an influence to
Dunn's poetry. To this, Dunn says: "I'm not much a poet of place. Even
when I'm using the names of places in New Jersey, my focus is on 'the other
world inside this one.' I feel that I'm using place to talk about concerns that
transcend place." In regard to
W.C. Williams, his influence is "more aesthetic for me than it is
geographical." [...] Admitting he was somewhat enamoured by
the so-called "Deep Image" poem that seemed to be the trend of the
late 1960s and '70s, he found the need to resist. "Gradually I learned to
write a poetry that was mine. When I found myself writing a poem that was
inclined toward statement more than toward image, a poem slightly more
discursive, I had to learn how to pace and orchestrate effects in a different
way. It might be said that I've been trying to perfect such a poem ever
since." (from "Stephen
Dunn: Waking Up Poetry" by Mahlon Coop, Potpourri Vol. 14, No.
2.)
Like
most of our best poets and more than some, Dunn isn’t easy to classify. He
doesn’t represent any particular school, rides no particular hobbyhorse. A
major early influence is Frost, who Dunn says showed him how to have clarities
and mysteries at the same time. More recently, he has come to admire Eastern
European poets and cites Zbigniew Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska. (review
of 'Different Hours' by Stephen Dunn, Sunday, July 08, 2001Post Gazette)
CORNELIUS EADY (b. 1952)
LYNN EMANUEL (b. 1949)
MARTÍN ESPADA
Beth-Anne Fennelly
KM:
What author do you think has influenced you most?
BF: [Elizabeth] Bishop, and my pal Ann Fisher-Wirth (another Mississippi poet!)
and my professors.
(Interview
with Beth Ann Fennelly by Katherine Montgomery)
CAROLYN
FORCHE
Muriel Rukeyser
Anna Akhmatova
Yanni Ritsos
(others see below)
"When Forché's, Gathering the
Tribes was published in 1975, Stanley Kunitz's selection that year for the Yale
Younger Poet's Prize, Kenneth Rexroth wrote with prescience: 'Carolyn Forché is
beyond question the best woman poet to appear in the Yale Younger Poet series
since Muriel Rukeyser, whom in a special way she somewhat resembles. She is far
better education than most poets, not just in school, but in life.. .She is
also something nobody ever seemed to be able to find in the 30's whe they were
in demand--a genuine proletarian poet.' Rexroth was stumbling, more for what
Forché herself later called the poetry of witness than the poetry of political
class, but the comparison to Rukeyser is nontheless inviting." (David W.
Faulkner Introduces Forche at the NYS Summer Writers Institute, 7/2/97)
"Something happed along the way to the introspective poet I had been. My new work seemed controversial to my American contemporaries, who argued against its 'subject matter,' or against the right of a North American to contemplate such issues in her work, or against any mixing of what they saw as the mutually exclusive realms of the personal and the political. Like many other poets, I felt I had no real choice regarding the impulse of my poems, and had only to wait, in meditative expectancy. In attempting to come to terms with the question of poetry and politics, I turned to the work of Anna Akhmatova, Yanni Ritsos, Paul Celan, Fredrico Garcia Lorca, Nazim Hikmet, and others. I began collecting their work, and soon found myself a repository of what began to be called 'the poetry of witness.'" (from her introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.)
CAROL FROST
Alice Fulton
TESS GALLAGHER (b. 1943)
JAMES GALVIN (b. 1951)
FOREST GANDER (b. 1956)
Deborah Garrison
NIKKI GIOVANNI (b. 1960)
LOUISE GLÜCK
JORIE
GRAHAM (b.
1959)
Elizabeth Bishop
Wallace Stevens (b. 1879)
Poet Jorie Graham says (Craig Lambert's "Image and the Arc
of Feeling," January-February, page 39) that she was concerned that
having a child would hamper her as a poet, commenting that of the women poets
who had strongly influenced her work--Sappho, Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop,
Marianne Moore--"Not one of them had children.
Wallace Stevens is a particularly important presence, a natural influence on this philosopher-poet [Jorie Graham]." ... Graham's more immediate precursors. Threads from Bishop, Lowell, Ammons, and others have been woven into the unique fabric of the work[...] Graham is a natural heir to modernism, the foremost poet to carry forth its ambitious project, discredited by recent purveyors of the new. (Online Review of Graham's The Errancy by Bonnie Costello in Boston Review)
BARBARA GUEST (b. 1920)
THOM GUNN (b. 1929)
MARILYN HACKER
(b.
1942) (see also Expansive/Neo-formalist
poetry)
In
an interview on form by Annie Finch, Marilyn Hacker discusses her influences.
(in The American Poetry Review; Philadelphia; May 1996; Finch, Annie; Volume:
25 Issue: 3 -- periodicals Thomas Library)
RACHEL HADAS
DONALD HALL (b. 1928)
JOY HARJO
MICHAEL HARPER
ROBERT HASS (b. 1941)
ANTHONY HECHT (b. 1923)
LYN HEJINIAN (b. 1941) (see
also L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poetry)
Gertrude Stein
Three
nights of readings at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania
featured three contemporary poets reading their own and a modernist's writings.
In her reading, Lyn Hejinian expressed a relationship to the work of Gertrude
Stein. These programs were recorded in digital audio, and are now available as
a permanent archive of the project. (Hejinian's 30-minute reading.)1)
BRENDA HILLMAN (b. 1951)
"The fact is that a lot of experimental contemporary writing comes out
of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, and of course Stein. The forms in
experimental writing come from a lot of different sources. I would never want
to say to somebody, You stole my work-unless they actually took my words, which
has actually happened on a couple of occasions, without citation to that
effect. But people don't own ways of writing, and so it seemed important to
kind of get that notion into the world. There are original moments in art, as
in everything. But nobody owns those." ("Our Very Greatest Human Thing
Is Wild: An Interview with Brenda Hillman by Sarah Rosenthal in Rain Taxi Online)
EDWARD HIRSCH (b. 1950)
Wallace Stevens
Hart Crane
"Well, both Stevens and Moore are poets I admire, but they can be very
cool. Stevens has his deep passions, but mostly they are suppressed and have to
come steaming to the surface from a long way down. One of the things I saw as my
task was to add the heat to whatever I learned from his work. I felt and still
feel much closer—in terms of the passions of poetry—to Keats and to Shelley,
who give such high priority to emotion. Intensity is all. My reading of the
modern poets was that they offered me wondrously different things, and my task
would be to supply some of the things they didn’t offer. I felt I had a place
at the table. I thought, “What if you took some of that discursive intelligence
in Stevens and gave it tremendous warmth and heat? What would happen if a
Stevensian poetry was written with the same kind of passion and intensity as
say, others might associate with a poet like James Wright?” I wanted to keep
the intelligence without losing the emotional affect. I learned from Stevens a
certain way of thinking in poetry. In terms of emotional temperature, I always
felt closer to Hart Crane." (Hirsch interview with Tod Marshall, The Kenyon Review)
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Emily Dickinson (b. 1830)
Walt Whitman (b. 1819)
"Although the prevailing consciousness is Buddhist, the presiding
influence is Dickinson. Like Dickinson, Hirshfield often manages to yoke the
inner and the outer worlds into close quarters through the use of metaphysical
conceits and surprising metaphors. And like Dickinson, the results are often
achingly ecstatic: "Even the long-beloved /was once/ an unrecognized
stranger./Just so/ the chipped lip/ of a blue-glazed cup,/ blown field/ of a
yellow curtain,/might also,/ flooding and falling,/ ruin your heart"
("Meeting the Light Completely"). These poems know the ruins, and
place them lovingly beside the pristine and restored, all the be praised."
(from a review of Hirshfield's The October Palace in The Antioch Review, Vol.
53, Issue 1)
"Jane Hirshfield, a lyricist in the lineage of Emily Dickinson, Edna St.
Vincent Millay, and Elizabeth Bishop, continues, at mid-career, to compose
poems that extend unmistakably from her earlier work, attentive to the ways of
peaceful mind and heart, bearing sibylline perception with each closely hewn
stanza." (in nowculture.com's review of Hirshfield's Given Sugar, Given
Salt)
"Like many of her contemporaries, she writes free verse in American
diction, and she loves Whitman, Dickinson, Kinnell, Bishop, Snyder, and
Hass-not to mention those other "American" influences, Neruda, Rilke,
Milosz-but it is her acquaintance with profoundly exoticsensibilities-from
India, China, and especially Japan-that lend her work a distinct depth and
air." (excerpt from Ploughshares
article)
In an interview in Contemporary Authors, Hirschfield cites
as influences "the Greek and Roman lyrics, the English sonnet, those
foundation stones of American poetry - Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson - and
'modern' poets from T.S. Eliot to Anna Akhmatova to C.P. Cavafy to Pablo
Neruda." She adds that they "all have added something to my knowledge
of what is possible in poetry." Her work also reflects her interest in,
and study of, classical Chinese poets Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, and Han Shan;
classical Japanese Heian-era poets Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu; and such
lesser known traditions as Eskimo and Nahuatl poetry.
TONY HOAGLAND (b. 1953)
JOHN HOLLANDER (b. 1929)
GARRETT HONGO (b. 1951)
Walt Whiman
"Hongo's
use of parallel phrasing can be described at times as Whitmanesque; in his
poetic narrative, he carefully layers words
and images. Hongo infuses the visual with other sensate details. Also, animal
imagery as well as Hawaiian legend inform his
poetic irnpressions. Consequently, memories imbued with cultural and organic
resonances display reverence for nature and its
power to help people establish their own identities." (Suzanne K. Arakawa
in Encyclopedia of
American Literature. Steven R. Serafin, Editor).
RICHARD HOWARD
Marie Howe
SUSAN HOWE (b. 1937) (see
also L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poetry)
ANDREW HUDGINS (b. 1951)
RICHARD HUGO (b. 1923)
DAVID
IGNATOW
MARK JARMAN (b. 1952) (see
also Expansive/Neo-formalist
poetry)
Robinson Jeffers (b. 1887)
One of the founders of the New Narrative movement in contemporary poetry, Mark
Jarman recovers lost storytelling traditions in a poetry that is grounded in
specific places (California, Scotland, and rural Kentucky) and specific times
(particularly his childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s). With
partner Robert McDowell, Jarman was the cofounder of the Reaper, the primary
organ of the New Narrative movement. Jarman has often advanced highly polemical
arguments for narrative poetry as an antidote to what he sees as exhausted
lyric and meditative modes of contemporary verse. But his collections of poems
are more convincing arguments for narrative, demonstrating a growing facility
with all aspects of the art. However strident the Reaper pronouncements may
have been at time...In Far and Away Jarman returns to some of his most powerful
subject matter with a newfound poetic distance, and the extended narratives "A
Daily Glory" and "Lost in a Dream" cover new ground in terms of
poetic technique. In these poems Jarman works with longer lines, a change that
is important for his later poetry. In The Black Riviera two poems, "The
Mystic" and "The Death of God," employ lines reminiscent of
those of Robinson Jeffers, about whom Jarman has written, and Jeffers becomes a
central presence in Jarman's book-length narrative poem Iris (1992). (excerpt
by: Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University (in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120:
American Poets Since World War II, Third Series, 1992, pp. 156-161.)
June Jordan
DONALD JUSTICE (b. 1925)
BOB KAUFMAN (b. 1925)
BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY (b. 1951)
X.J. KENNEDY (b. 1929)
JANE KENYON (b. 1947)
Anna Akhmatova
Jane Kenyon once said that at a certain point in her career she took Anna
Akhmatova's poetry and worked
with Akhmatova as a master.
GALWAY KINNELL (b. 1927)
Walt Whitman (b.
1819)
Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
As
contemporary poets with a special interest in the natural world, Kinnell shares
connections with the open-form experimentation of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg
and the Beats, and various "naked poetry" schools and movements from
the 1960s on.
CAROLYN KIZER (b. 1925)
In
an interview with Barbara Thompson, poet Carolyn Kizer discusses how she became
a poet and her influences. ("The Art of Poetry LXXXI: Carolyn Kizer"
in Paris Review.
v42n154 Spring 2000. p.344-369)
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT (b. 1931)
Langston Hughes (b. 1902)
Walt Whitman (b. 1819)
"Langston
Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Walt Whitman are the major influences on Knight's
poetry. Knight's "The Idea of Ancestry" flows in a Whitmanesque style
and his "Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy" stems from the transcribed
oral, blues poetic tradition of Hughes and Brown. He has indicated these
influences in "An Interview with Etheridge Knight."'" by
Patricia L. Hill (San
Francisco Review of Books 3, no. 9 [1978]: 10).
BILL KNOT
KENNETH KOCH (see also the New York
School)
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (b. 1947)
MAXINE KUMIN (b. 1925)
STANLEY KUNITZ (b. 1905)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (b. 1844)
One
interviewer, in asking of Kunitz relationship to religion, refers to his early
influences: "Many of the poets you loved--your early influences--Herbert,
Donne, Blake, Hopkins--I think of as essentially religious poets."
Sharon
Olds
Marie
Howe
Carolyn
Forche
Philip
Levine
Pablo
Neruda
Walt
Whitman
the
"Confessional
Poets"
TOWER: Sharon
Olds is mentioned several times in, The Poets Companion, as a writer
whose work is a good model for students of poetry, as well as for the pleasure
of reading well-crafted poetry. You have also spoken of her greatness as a poet
of domestic/erotic love. How much of an impact has her poetry had on you and
your work? What other contemporary poets have made similar impression on
you?
LAUX: Olds is fearless. Without the model of Olds as a writer who sees heroism
in the ordinary, the daily, the domestic, I could
not have written the poems I have written. Her sex poems are luminous with
darkness and complexity and I am indebted to her for forging that territory. I
read her first when I took a night class from poet Steve Kowit and I was
absolutely blown asunder. I see in my students' faces the same awe and
gratitude that I felt when she first spoke to me. She uncovers so much and is
unafraid to bring it up into the light, to turn it in every direction so that
each shadow is revealed. What more could we ask of our poets but to be that
careful, courageous and precise? That awed by life? Her poems have a raw energy
that can only be gotten to if you go down into the mines and haul up their dark
fruit. Other poets I am in awe of are Marie Howe, Carolyn Forche, Philip
Levine, Pablo Neruda and, of course, Whitman. More recently I've been reading
Susan Yuzna's
Her Slender Dress, and Belle Waring's Dark Blonde, both poets
with enormous energy, and a quirkiness in their rhythms
and use of language and humor. Billy Collins is a favorite, as well as the poet
Doug Anderson who has written wonderful
poems about the Vietnam war in his book The Moon Reflected Fire.
" My poetry
is called confessional and I have no problem with the term though I think it is
often misused in
the way I have described. There are poems that have not yet become art, that
stay at the simple level of pure confession, or
poems that focus more on the psychology of an individual rather than on the
psychological moment." (excerpt from an email assisted interview series
hosted by C.K. Tower)
LI-YOUNG LEE (b. 1957)
Walt Whitman (b. 1819)
Theodore
Roethke (b. 1908)
William
Carlos Williams (b. 1883)
Rainer Maria Rilke (b. 1875)
Among
the literary influences that Lee has acknowledged are the biblical Song of
Songs, Gerald Stern’s Lucky Life, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling,
Meister Eckhart’s sermons, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” The
spiritual and emotional experience of the poems is accompanied by a
down-to-earth sensualness that Lee says “comes from my obsession with the body,
man-body, earth-body, woman-body, father-body, mother-body, mind-body (for I
experience the mind as another body) and the poem body.” This vision may
suggest the influence of Whitman, but it is also rooted in Daoism. Lee is
familiar with Daoist texts and admires Lao Zi, Lie Zi, and Zhuang Zi, whose
sense of wonder and mystery and whose paradoxical and skeptical characteristics
are evident in Lee’s poems and prose-poem memoir. (bio
by Xiaojing Zhou, Textbook Site for: The Heath Anthology of American
Literature, 4th ed.)
"[Li-Young Lee's] poems are explosive and earthy,
and in The City in Which I Love You he has come into his own. . . .
Like a pairing of Walt Whitman with the great Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu, Li-Young
Lee emerges as an audacious and passionate poet-traveler. In the manner of Tang
poetry, he speaks colloquially but metaphysically; he meditates, but always
allows the noises of the world to enter. He is best when he courts
understatement (for at times the Whitman influence seems too heavy-handed for
his fine perceptions). . . . Still, if Mr. Lee's sins are those of excess, they
are almost always forgivable in the ambitious context of his book. He takes
chances many others in our timid, cool, self-conscious age would not."
(poet Carol Muske writes in The New York Times Book Review)
Jordan: You’ve been
likened to Theodore Roethke, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. Do you
feel their voices echo through your own?
Lee: I read them with love so I suppose you can’t help but have them
influence you on some level. Isn’t that the way you read, too, Marie? You can’t
help but take them inside you.
Jordan: You’ve also been compared to Rilke, especially with your first
book of poems, Rose. Was he an influence in those early poems?
Lee: That is a funny thing. I hadn’t read Rilke yet when I wrote those
poems in Rose.
(excerpt from "An
Interview with Li-Young Lee" by Marie Jordan from the May/Summer 2002
issue of The Writer's Chronicle. © 2002)
DENISE LEVERTOV (b. 1923) (see
also the
Black Mountain poets)
William Carlos Williams
Wallace Stevens (b. 1879)
Robert Creeley (b. 1926)
Charles Olson (b. 1910)
Robert Duncan (b. 1919)
Rainer Maria Rilke
(Levertov Interviewed by Sybil Estess)
Estess: You have spoken
a great deal about American writers, such as those within the Black Mountain
school of poets, who
became your friends and who influenced you after you married Mitchell Goodman
and moved to the United States. I wonder if you would care to rename any
American writers who influenced you other than these.
Levertov:
William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens.
Estess:
You have written more of your being influenced by Williams than you have about
Stevens's influence on you. What
drew you to Stevens's poetry?
Levertov:
Stevens is a very musical poet, and it's really the sensuous aspects of his
poetry which I have always liked. I am
fascinated with his use of language for its own sake.
Estess:
Do you think that perhaps your poems are often like his in this way?
Levertov:
I think that there are poems of mine which show Stevens's influence, but
influences do not stick out as if they were
bumps. You absorb them; you cannot really talk about them directly. I can speak
a bit more concretely about Williams's
influence on me because certainly, coming from England, as I did, the manner in
which he incorporated the rhythms and diction
of common speech into his poetry gave me a shot in the arm and a way in which
to deal with coming to live in America.
After
her move to the U.S., Levertov was introduced to the Transcendentalism of
Emerson and Thoreau, formal experimentation of Ezra Pound, and, in particular,
the work of William Carlos Williams. Through her husband's friendship with poet
Robert Creeley, she became associated with the Black Mountain group of poets,
particularly Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan, who had formed a
short-lived but groundbreaking school in 1933 in North Carolina. Levertov
acknowledged these influences, but disclaimed membership in any poetic school.
Early in her
career, Levertov became associated with the poets of the Black Mountain school,
and she credited the spare, clear, objective work of the poet William Carlos
Williams with helping her develop her own vital American style of composition.
She tended to avoid the use of metaphor and allusion, preferring instead the
direct and immediate description of objects, perceptions, and feelings in the
rhythms of ordinary speech.
Levertov has
acknowledged the significant influence of Rilke on her poetry and
poetics throughout her career, and several of her recent "Variation on a
Theme from Rilke" poems will be enriched by Edward Zlotkowski's insightful
essay "Levertov and Rilke: A Sense of Aesthetics" in Twentieth
Century Literature, Fall 1992.
----------------------------------
Levertov’s reflections on the "vocation" of the poet should also be examined in light of the notable influence of the poetry and poetics of Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke - an influence that she tells us in "Rilke as Mentor" predated by seven or eight years her coming to America and her reading of Williams, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. (from "Themes in Denise Levertov's Poetry" by Joan F. Hallisey, Modern American Poetry website)
PHILLIP LEVINE (b. 1928)
William Carlos Williams (b. 1818)
Robert Lowell
T.S. Eliot
When asked who were some of the most important early influences on
his voice, Levine responds: "When I came back to writing, I was much more
cognizant of the movement of traditional English poetry, Eliot being an early
sponsor of my work. Robert Lowell was another powerful influence; I could hear
in him an American talking to other Americans, very seriously, very musically,
very lyrically, but still talking. In Hart Crane, too, I could hear this
speaking voice. And when I looked at Lowell and Crane, I could see the immense
formal control; they were able to do things with traditional English structures
and rhyme that were very difficult. Then I looked at William Carlos Williams,
the most important voice I came across, and I didn't see any of that, and I
wondered, Why is this so extraordinary? I had to dig another level deeper, and
hear how his exploiting the natural resonance of each word created forms that
never existed before. I was intrigued by his use of people speaking, by the
idea that the vitality of the spoken voice could be captured in poetry. There
was something magical in Williams that I was striving for, but I doubt I ever
quite got it, to be frank. I have been a more controlled poet."
Robert Lowell (see
also confessional
poetry)
Elizabeth Bishop
"Though Lowell repeatedly confessed his debt to Bishop's poetry, her debt
to his is less well known." (excerpt
from The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th Ed.)
THOMAS LUX (b. 1947) see
also "deep
image"- neo-surrealist poetry
Bill Knott
James Tate
Michael Benedict
Walt Whitman
I was grouped with, and most influenced by the poets that were called
Neo-Surrealists at the time, because that was a time during which Surrealism
had a great influence on contemporary American poetry. Knott was a
Neo-Surrealist, and Tate was a Neo-Surrealist, and maybe still is; Michael
Benedict was a Neo-Surrealist—the big Surrealist anthology came out of this
some years later. I was reading all the French Surrealists and the Spanish
Surrealists, so I was probably most influenced by that kind of group of poets,
the Surrealists, and so-called Neo-Surrealists. After a few years, Surrealism
felt like a dead end to me,
and even though I still appreciate a lot of the wackinessand the imagination of
Surrealist poetry, I'm not very interested in it anymore. It seems too
arbitrary, and again, kind of lazy. It doesn't pay enough attention to the
musical elements of poetry. So now I refer to myself as a recovering
Surrealist. (Issue 8
The Cortland Review August 1999)
Interviewer: You sometimes call yourself a "recovering
surrealist." I thought your latest book, THE STREET OF CLOCKS, contained a
lot of surrealist imagery. Did you want to return to that style of writing?
Thomas Lux: I wouldn't call it surrealism. To me, the
difference between surrealism and just plain metaphor is that surrealism is
arbitrary. In surrealism, you bump things up against each other that are never
up against each other, and sometimes that collision of opposites might create
something new, but other times it sounds merely arbitrary. I think what Wallace
Stevens said about surrealism is true: "It's not enough for something to
invent; it also has to discover." I jokingly call myself a recovering
surrealist because I was greatly influenced by surrealist writings as a young
poet. I truly, deeply value the imaginative, playful, irreverent, revolutionary
qualities of surrealism, but what I don't like about it is that it has a lot to
do with accident.
(interview with
Thomas Lux)
Thomas Lux has been compared, often, with Whitman; Whitman who reminds us that "latent in all great users of words must be all passions, crimes, trades, animals, stars, sex, God, the past, might, space, metals, and the like." That's Whitman's job description for the poet. Lux has, as Whitman prescribes, catalogued a plenitude in his over fifteen collections. Home-truths, blue-collar work songs, advice and warnings turn up in his poems. (from Readings in Contemporary Poetry, Introduction by Brighde Mullins)
NATHANIEL MACKEY (b. 1947)
William
Matthews
LYNNE McMAHON
Anna Akhmatova (b. 1889)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (b. 1844)
In
her newest collection, Lynne McMahon offers poems of memory and youth; of
literary influences, from Anna Akhmatova (who has given this book its title) to
Gerard Manley Hopkins; and of adulthood and the ambiguities of family life.
J.D. McCLATCHY (b. 1945)
HEATHER McHUGH (b. 1948)
SANDRA McPHERSON
WILLIAM
MEREDITH
W.S. MERWIN (b. 1927) (also
see ecopoetry)
JAMES
MERRILL
THYLIAS MOSS (b. 1954)
LISEL
MUELLER
Paul
Muldoon
DAVID
MURA (b. 1952)
"Among
the poets I've been influenced by I'd include the following poets from the
traditional literary canon--Shakespeare, Donne, Browning, Yeats, Robert Lowell,
Elizabeth Bishop, Aime Ceasaire. From the living canon I'd include Philip
Levine, Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz. I've admired the example and fortitude
of poets like Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks and Adrienne Rich and have been
delighted and encouraged by the work of a number of my contemporaries, such as
Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, Yusef Komunyaaka, Marilyn Chin, Jimmy Santiago
Baca, Joy Harjo, and numerous others. I see myself as a member of the first
fully integrated generation of American poets, all of us creating a new vision
of America and poetry for the world." --David Mura (excerpt)
CAROL MUSKE
MARILYN NELSON
HOWARD NEMEROV
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
FRANK O'HARA see also the New York
School & Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto" & O'Hara Directory
SHARON OLDS
Sylvia Plath
Anne Sexton
the confessional
poetry
MARY OLIVER (b. 1935) (also
see ecopoetry)
Walt Whitman (b. 1819)
Her
poems of thirty years and her recent prose collection, Blue Pastures (1995),
reveal an art driven by visionary conviction in a manner similar to her claimed
influences, William Blake and Walt Whitman. Expressed in simple language and
familiar imagery, evoking dark and joyous states, this vision of nature is
often conveyed in an ecstatic voice that compels. Celebratory and spiritual in
her poetic vision, Oliver is one of America 's finest nature poets. . . . (from
Encylopedia of American
Literature. Steven R. Serafin, Ed. [1999])
CHARLES
OLSON
(b. 1910) (see also the
Black Mountain poets)
MICHAEL ONDAATJE (b. 1943)
Simon Ortiz
One of the most interesting contributions is from Alicia Ostriker
whose '"A Wish to Make Real to Myself What is Most Real": My H.D.' is
a clear and lucid explanation of the formal and thematic aspects of H.D.'s work
that influenced her own poetry. She singles out her collection A Woman Under
the Surface (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) as evidence of
H.D.'s literary legacy identifying 'a certain silver sheen' in these poems, albeit
'a bit tarnished' that mimics the hardened surfaces of H.D.'s own poetry. She
also recalls writing the final poem of 'Message for the Sleeper at Hell's
Mouth', recognizing that were it not for Trilogy and Helen in Egypt she would
not have been capable of completing this sequence of poems, a sequence that
culminates in the acceptance of the coexistence of good and evil. (H.D. and
Poets After)
MICHAEL PALMER (b. 1943) (see
also L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poetry)
LINDA PASTAN (b. 1932)
SYLVIA PLATH (b. 1932) (see
also confessional
poetry)
CARL PHILLIPS (b. 1959)
MARGE PIERCY (b. 1936)
STANLEY PLUMLY (b. 1939)
ROBERT PINSKY (b. 1940)
Robert Lowell (b. 1917)
T.S. Eliot (b. 1888)
Emily Dickinson
Pinsky's
"Figured Wheel" was nominated for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize and he is
the former Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry of the United States.
Pinsky's closest kin in terms of thematic material would appear to be Alan
Ginsberg. Pinsky is preoccupied with family and religious motifs, which are set
against the backdrop of class-divided American society. There is a strong
prophetic aspect as well. The big difference between Ginsberg and Pinsky is
that Pinsky operates within the stylistic parameters of the post-TS Eliot
school. His biggest influence stylistically appears to be the late Robert
Lowell. Kathe Pollitt captured the interesting synthesis between his rather
visionary themes and the conventional forms they are expressed in a NY Times
review: "Pinsky's extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful volume of
collected poems...will remind readers that here is a poet who, without forming
a mini-movement or setting himself loudly at odds with the dominant tendencies
of American poetry, has brought it into something new."
Pinsky,
whose work was influenced by jazz, rock and roll, baseball and the poetry of
John Keats, T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson, was named the U.S. poet laureate in
1997.
Claudia Rankine
ADRIENNE RICH (b. 1929)
Walt Whitman (b. 1819)
Emily Dickinson (b. 1830)
Muriel Rukeyser (b. 1913)
Her
work, What Is Found
There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, takes its title from a
stanza of William Carlos Williams: "It is difficult/to get the news from
poems/yet men die miserably every day for lack/of what is found there." This
work contains an elaborate defense of political poetry, an intricate reading of
three of her great predecessors (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Muriel
Rukeyser), and generous introductions to dozens of contemporary political
poets.
PATTIANN ROGERS (also see ecopoetry)
MURIEL RUKEYSER (b. 1913)
(see Anne Sexton)
SONIA SANCHEZ (b. 1934) (The Black Arts
Movement)
Malcolm X
Amiri Baraka (LeRoy Jones)
Langston Hughes
Margaret Walker
Gwendolyn Brooks
KELLY::
What were the main literary and cultural influences on your poetry?
SANCHEZ:
My literary influences came from watching a lot of people who were activists or
established people in the black community: Jean Hudson, who was a curator at
the chomburg and gave me my first books to read; Mr. Micheux, who owned a
bookstore at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue; Richard Moore, who owned another
bookstore and gave me my first books about black folk in the Caribbean; and
then, of course, John Henrik Clarke, a man who began to teach me a lot about
African history. And then Malcolm, whose influence on us all was great. Those
were some of the first people who began, in a sense, to encourage us all. And,
of course, I read Langston Hughes. And I read Countee Cullen, and Paul Laurence
Dunbar, and then Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. There was a black woman
who was a librarian at the library I went to at 145th Street between Amsterdam
Avenue and Broadway who gave me one of the major anthologies of African
American poetry to read. And she gave me a book of poetry by Alexander Pushkin
which I was fascinated by. I used to go into the library every day--every day!
But I was going in and getting these little smutty books, novels. I'd take them
home and read them in one sitting, right? And so one day she just decided to
give me something beyond novels: "Here, you might like this." The
book was the poetry of Langston Hughes, so I'm forever grateful for her.
(from Discipline and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez (by Susan Kelly,
African American Review, Winter 2000, Vol. 34 Issue 4, p679 -- full text of
interview available online)
"If you want to grasp the importance of Malcolm X, compare the late
writings of Sonia Sanchez or Imamu Baraka with their early, pre-Malcolm works.
Bro. Imamu and Sis. Sonia would certainly acknowledge Malcolm's influence.
Check out the change of tone and language, the irony and just plain dynamite
that developed--and things will become obvious...The fact is, Malcolm X had a fantastic
impact, like Garvey in his time, on all the Black Arts. Malcolm's influence on
Black Poetry in particular is only too obvious - -- yes, and it is just as
obvious in all the Black Arts." [Dingane / "A Review of Dynamite Voices, Don L.
Lee,"
pages 89 and 90
SHEROD SANTOS (b. 1948)
MAY SARTON (b. 1912)
ANNE SEXTON (b. 1928) (see
also confessional
poetry)
Muriel Rukeyser (b. 1913)
Robert Lowell
Sylvia Plath
W.D. Snodgrass
the "Confessional Poets"
The violence and injustice she saw, in the United States and abroad, led her
poetry to function as a mode of social protest. She felt a deep responsibility
to comment on human issues and was particularly concerned with inequalities of
sex, race and class. With her poems, she frequently documented her own
emotional experiences within the context of a greater political or social
event. . . Many women poets have claimed Rukeyser's influence on their work,
Anne Sexton among them. (from The Academy of American Poets bio -- see URL for
Sexton)
Like
Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on
her work), and other "confessional" poets, Sexton offers the reader
an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. (excerpt
from bio at Academy of
American Poets website)
NTOZAKE SHANGE (b. 1948)
KARL SHAPIRO (b. 1913)
CHARLES SIMIC (b. 1938)
Ezra Pound
Williams Carlos Williams
Wallace Stevens
When
asked, "Who are your influences?," Simic responded: "The way Don
Juan adored different kind of women I adored different kind of poets. I went to
bed, so to speak, with ancient Chinese, old Romans, French Symbolists, and
American Modernists individually and in groups. I was so promiscuous. I'd be
lying if I pretended that I had just one great love." (Charles Simic:
Interview by J.M. Spalding 1999 The Cortland Review, Issue Four)
Robert Bly, James Tate, James Wright
Simic's ironic, precise and philosophical poetry has some affinity with the
Deep Image Poets, although Simic's European roots
have kept his work distinct. Mark Strand states: "There is a sense in
[Simic's] work that images precede objects, that the world is
a creation of myth, that nothing is what we thought it to be, but somehow
always suspected it might be. In Charles Simic's poems we experience those
sudden swift recognitions of spirit which illumine." (from brief on-line
biography)
LOUIS SIMPSON (b. 1923)
TOM SLEIGH (b. 1953)
GARY SNYDER (b. 1930) also
see "Gary
Snyder at the Blue Neon Alley" (also see ecopoetry)
Allen Ginsburg
Snyder, a peer of beat poets and beatniks Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, is
an accomplished anthropologist and scholar of Chinese, Japanese, and Zen
Buddhism. These influences, as well as a robust respect for indigenous cultures
and their approach towards nature, infuse much of Snyder's poetry and imagery.
(from The International River Network's Second Annual "Politics and Poetry
of Rivers" by Julie Tsa at BigCityLit.com)
GARY SOTO (b. 1952)
Soto began to read world literature during his junior year in college, and
continues to read widely today. "I didn't come from a family where reading
was a part of daily life, so I feel I got a late start, but I made up for
it," he says. He acknowledges Knut Hamson, Pablo Neruda, Italo Calvino,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. and Henry James as his strongest literary influences.
(The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Profiles: Contemporary Poets)
ELIZABETH SPIRES (b. 1952)
Elizabeth Bishop
In 1977, Spires also approached Elizabeth Bishop, a longstanding influence, to
ask for an interview; it was subsequently published in The Paris Review, and,
as Bishop’s last full-length interview, remains a vital literary record. "About
Elizabeth Spires: A Profile" by A. V. Christie. Ploughshares)
MARK STRAND (b. 1934)
Wallace Stevens (b. 1879)
David
Kirby correctly connects "Keeping Things Whole" with Wallace Stevens,
one of the primary influences evident in the collections of poetry Strand has
produced throughout his career. (in VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW Contemporary
Poetry and Poetics "Four Decades of Mark Strand's Poetry by Edward
Byrne"s "Weather Watch: Mark Strand's The Weather of Words"
Strand admittedly has long admired Stevens's work, and read Stevens even before
beginning to write his own poetry. (He once remarked to Wayne Dodd: "I
discovered I wasn't destined to be a very good painter, so I became a poet. Now
it didn't happen suddenly. I did read a lot, and I had been a reader of poetry
before. In fact, I was much more given to reading poems than I was to fiction
and the book that I read a lot, and frequently, was The Collected Poems of
Wallace Stevens") (excerpt
from From Creating Another Self: Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry.
Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson
University Press, 1995.)
WILLIAM STAFFORD (b. 1914)
GERALD STERN (b. 1925)
e.e. cummings
"Gerald
Stern writes only with great passion, and so he writes passionately about the
poets he loves - John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Paul Goodman, and e.e.
cummings - linking specific poems to his sad, deeply affecting elegy for Larry
Levis, a poet friend who had recently died. But he's often at a loss to say
exactly how these poems mattered to the process of his own composition. He
cites, for example, cummings' marvelous, fierce 'i sing of Olaf glad and big,'
saying that it 'has been a tremendous influence.'" (from Jay Parini's review of the
book My Business Is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery, Edited by
Stephen Berg)
MAY SWENSON (b. 1919)
JAMES TATE (b. 1943)
the "deep
image"- neo-surrealist poetry
Frank O'Hara & the New York
School
INTERVIEWER:
I think of certain people who remind me from time to time of your work but it's
not so much in style the way your poems sound is so unique - but certainly in
attitude, in the sense that you allow yourself to speak in a vernacular voice,
that you can digress. I mean they remind me of other poets influenced by
Williams - so someone like O'Hara who seems always willing to say what needs to
be said when it needs to be said. And so in that sense its much more about an
attitude about what poetry should be and what it can be. Does that make sense?
TATE: Yea! (CrossConnect
interview with James Tate)
Thanks
to books like The Lost Pilot, surrealism became one of the mainstream styles of
American poetry in the 1970s. Indeed, it became the most influential style
among male poets. (The women had more public issues of feminism to address.)
Older writers like Robert Bly, James Wright, and Donald Hall switched styles to
create the "deep image" poem. Although most of them had once composed
in rhyme and meter, they now wrote minimalist free verse full of mysterious
images drawn from the natural world–a style that was soon wickedly nicknamed
"the stones and bones" school of poetry. Yugoslavian-born Charles Simic
and Canadian-born Mark Strand recreated an Eastern-European style poem
convincingly in American English–spare, quiet but luminous. But there was also
a younger, more swaggering school led by Tate that practiced a jazzy and
absurdist brand of surrealism. The point of this new style sometimes seemed to
be creating a situation or sequence of images as evocatively bizarre and
disturbingly creepy as possible. The tone was at once understated and
aggressive. Everything, especially violent or depressing subjects, was
presented with dark and detached humor. (from a radio review of Jame
Tate's Selected Poems originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3, text first printed
in Denver Quarterly, Fall 1998 with Dana Gioia)
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT
DAVID WAGONER (b. 1926)
DIANE WAKOSKI (b. 1937)
the 'Beat Poets'
DEREK WALCOTT (b. 1930)
ALICE WALKER (b. 1944)
RICHARD WILBUR (b. 1921)
Robert Frost
Marianne Moore
William Carlos Williams
Because Wilbur's poetry is characterized by well-wrought images and carefully
crafted words, rhythms, and formal patterns, it is not surprising that he counts
John Milton as one of the poets who has influenced him. As a scholar of the
17th century, Wilbur has taught Milton to students, but he also "takes
excitement and nourishment from him." Other strong influences he claims
are William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost. (from Profiled: Contemporary
Poets, Heath Anthology of American Literature at Heath Anthology Website)
Wilbur’s most important literary friendship at Harvard, however, was with Robert Frost. Although there was nearly a half century difference in their ages, the two poets became fast friends. The often cantankerous Frost recognized the admiring younger poet’s talent, but what initially caught his attention was Charlee Ward Wilbur’s maiden name. Her grandfather had in 1894 been the first editor to publish Frost’s poems. This early friendship had a lifelong impact on Wilbur. Frost’s poetic style–with its balance of formal music and conversational tone, its engaging surface sense and disturbing depths–deeply influenced Wilbur’s notion of lyric poetry. (from Richard Wilbur: A Critical Survey of His Career, Dana Gioia Online)
Image: Marianne Moore's
poetics of careful, precise observation seems to have influenced not only
Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, but often your own. How important was Moore to your
development? In what ways do you find yourself writing a poetry with a kinship
to Bishop's, and where are the formal and metaphysical divergences between you?
Wilbur: From my early high school days on, I was reading poets like
Robert Frost and Hart Crane. But I didn't get knowledgeably excited about
contemporary poetry until I was in college and had been taught by a number of
wonderful teachers in Amherst's English department, teachers who had the
greatest enthusiasm for, among other things, Marianne Moore. The enthusiasm of
people I admired was one thing that steered me toward her. But I also felt a
natural affinity for her kind of thing: for poetry of close observation, for
poetry that acknowledges the importance of things however small, poetry that
aims to fuse moral and other thought with the creatures of this world. I felt
the same kind of affinity with Elizabeth Bishop, for obvious reasons, when I
began to read her a little later on. The same thing in William Carlos Williams
has always drawn me I was also attracted for something like the same reason to
the Frenchman Francis Ponge, a great celebrator of objects and creatures. I'm
drawn to that in almost any poet. D.H. Lawrence seems to me to be full of
shapeless blather a good deal of the time, but I love the side of him that's
concerned with plants and animals and with realizing things accurately and feelingly.
(excerpt from A Conversation
with Richard Wilbur Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion Issue
#12Winter 1995)
C.K. WILLIAMS (b. 1936)
Rainer Maria Rilke (b. 1875)
Q:
Are there any writers or poets who you would consider strong influences on your
own work?
A: Oh, yeah, many, many. The last two would be George Herbert, the Renaissance
poet, and Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet, has been an influence all along.
But over the last few years, it's been mostly George Herbert. Now I'm writing
about the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, and he's very important for me right
now.
also
read essay "Beginnings" online at Academy
of American Poets web site From Poetry and Conciousness by C. K.
Williams, published by University of Michigan Press. Copyright © 1998
C.D. WRIGHT (b. 1949)
CHARLES WRIGHT (b. 1935)
Ezra Pound
In
discussing his early influences, Wright comments: "I discovered poems in
Verona...I read a poem that Pound had written...and my life was changed
forever."
Born in 1953, Wright draws from a deep well of spiritual poetry confined not only tothe twentieth century. The disparate voices that echo in The Beforelife include Rene Char, Rainier Maria Rilke, and Ingeborg Bachmann—all of whom Wright has translated—as well as St. John of the Cross, Fernando Pessoa, John Clare, Kenji Miyazawa, Frank Stanford, and Bill Knott. But the echoes are faint; Wright's voice comes to us almost entirely sui generis. The result: half-surreal, half-aphoristic vignettes (the majority of his poems are, as Charles Simic has said, short enough to have been written on matchbook covers) that lurk quietly on the page and, in such a compact state, appear visually as if they were psalms.
JAMES WRIGHT
Theodore
Roethke
Georg Trakl
Robert Frost
Robert Bly (the "deep
image"- neo-surrealist poetry)
Wright...fell back heavily on the mannerisms of his friend Robert Bly, the Spanish surrealists, the Chinese poets, and the German poets Trakl and Rilke." (from "The Vision of a Practical Man" by Rodney Jones: Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 1991, Vol. 16, Issue 2)
Another critical influence on Wright was Robert Bly, with whom he worked closely in Minnesota. Always more a theoretician than Wright, Bly vigorously advocated a new kind of poetry. [...] Bly argued strongly for a poetry that would take its energy from unconscious or archetypal imagery [...] This involvement with poetry in other languages led Bly and Wright toward a new American surrealism, which found its local voice as the "deep image." [...] The deep imagists, influenced by Jung as much as by Neruda, sought through poetry a direct access to the unconscious rather than impressionistic rendering of surface phenomenon. The image gathers force within the unconscious and connects with the reader on equally unconscious levels. (James Wright, by David C. Dougherty, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987)
In Wright's own sense of his development it was to the Austrian poet Georg Trakl more than to anyone else that he was most deeply indebted for the discipline of opening one's eyes, of being silent and listening and waiting patiently, as he phrased it in a brief essay on Trakl, "for the inward bodies of things to emerge, for the inward voices to whisper." (from "Wright's Lyricism" by Nathan Scott, Southern Review, Spring 91, Vol 27, Issue 2)
[O]ne
cannot remark how reminiscent his accent of his early mentor, Theodore Roethke,
particularly in his devotion to what Roethke called "the small things of
the world." (from "Wright's Lyricism" by Nathan Scott, Southern
Review, Spring 91, Vol 27, Issue 2)