Whose child are u?
I let my mind wander into this territory every so often . . . as a poet and as an American, from what literary line am I descended? I have no doubt that the lineage can be traced to Europe, then Rome, then Greece. That is, I am a Westerner. The fact that I studied English and American lit in college and all thru grad & post grad ought to tell me that I am misinformed by the American view of the modernist movement, i.e., Pound, Eliot, and their board of erudite directors--everybody appearing in those standard university anthologies of the late sixties and all through the seventies.
Truth is more like this: my taste was poisoned by New Critics, particularly a couple of them at Indiana University, who taught me dissection, Blake style. The antidote was one Professor Richard Klawitter: long hair, smiling eyes, Oshkosh. He taught me to hear, hear the living thing. Then Aristotle taught me this: it's all just material (potential) shaped by the human self (to being) . . . and I am back where I started: the self influenced by whom, by what?
I dearly love the forms. That makes me a child of Emily Dickinson? Great slabs of talk-talk absolutely knock me out. And that makes me a Whitman baby. Neither, or at least, academically broad and therefore irrelevant. Here are, I think, some relatives, distant or close: Auden, Ashbery, Roethke, Williams, James Tate. All male, all white, most of 'em dead. Hmm. And that makes me a historical imperative.
So, if anyone's listening, whose child are u?
You're the latest point in a human conversation, then? My professor Walter Ong once told us graduate students that we were joining a professional conversation of people interested in literature. Not all of them are living, but all their ideas (contributions to the conversation) are still circulating around the room.
I guess I'm a child of Harold Bloom's influence. I've lived most of my adult life, probably my childhood, too, with voices in my head, not the schizophrenic kind, but voices of dead poets. There's Jeffers over in that corner saying something--Joy is a trick in the air--and other there in the dark is Emily, still talking about cathedrals and light. And others, all sitting around a table, talking, but not to one another, but like Duff and Beth in Harold Pinter's LANDSCAPE--all of them saying, "Listen. I'm your influence. You're my voice."