Stephen Dunn

So he was an influence in that way.

But he also loved like Albert Goldbarth and Stephen Dunn and folks like that who wrote these really wide-ranging poems.

Someone else who comes to mind that I think I mentioned before is Ross Gay, who can sometimes write these syntactically very complex, winding poems that you're like, I really just want to hear you read this, Ross, please.

I just want to hear it read out loud.

If you put them next to each other, sometimes that can create the meaning, so I don't have to impose it directly.

I once had this experience, I was in a workshop or it was a one on one session with Stephen Don when I was in my PhD program and I wrote this really earnest and probably sentimental miscarriage poem my wife had miscarried and I was writing about it and in the very last line I had either the word forever or eternity and you should probably purge those words from all poems but certainly you don't want them in the last line and so Stephen Dunn said to me what about this line and I started to apologize immediately he said well you might be able to salvage it if you put it somewhere else in the poem not at the end And I thought, oh, that's really fascinating because I thought either a line is bad or good and it doesn't depend on where it is.

I mean, that poem never came to anything, but that was a great lesson that sometimes if you hide a line that tells or comes close to asking questions.

poem sometimes you can get away with that early in the poem or in the middle and then you let image or metaphor complicate it or undercut it or whatever it might be so that's one other way that i'm trying to work with the meaning you know