Poets I consider influential: James Wright, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, John Berryman, A.R. Ammons, Marvin Bell, James Dickey, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, maybe Charles Simic.

Corwood? you are in my house, looking at my bookshelf?

I was trying to stick mostly with 20thc. writers. I could go on for days, and didn't want to bore everyone. (Yeats, Auden, Hughes, Whitman, Wordsworth, Shelley, Basho, Shakespeare, Rilke, Milton (yes, don't hurt me.).

Kat, you're right - it is how poetry is taught that is a big turnoff for a lot of people. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for fighting the good fight.

Corwood? you are in my house, looking at my bookshelf?

Heh. I have a movie review going up later today in which I prove my ultimate pansy-hood by ending a discussion about a football movie with James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio." I almost gave myself a swirlie for that one.

I was trying to stick mostly with 20thc. writers

Yeah, those are the ones with the greatest influence on the way I write, mainly because of the proximity of their syntax to my own. I based a lot of my little 33 1/3 book on Dante's Inferno, but I went with the John Ciardi translation (instead of, say, the Longfellow translation) because his ear is musical enough to incorporate prior translations into language more seamless with English as it is spoken now.

Does Ghastly become

I am SO not spoiling you! Nice try....

Here's that review I mentioned. It's on Nerve.com, so browse accordingly.

Nicely done, bunk. (And I totally would have called that town A-kee-lah, and gotten "You're not from around here, are you?" Of course, I get that around here, too. Even though in meatspace, I'm not likely to be mistaken for a Charm City homegirl.) There are a lot of black women coming up a few years after me that spell their name the way I do..that misunderstanding has come up a few times.

Hee. Part two of the Adolescent Reading Habits.

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Thanks, Erika!

That was a great read, Corwood!

Thanks, Kate!