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Writers of both poetry and fiction have had a profound impact on the development of my poetic process. To admit to influences I realize is necessary, although my success at mimicking and adopting stylistic traits has had mixed results. Three poets I attempt to steal from often: Galway Kinnell, e e cummings and Pablo Neruda. Trying to capture their essence, albeit naïve, and having their resultant effects in mind, I find qualified guidance. A personal weakness for the biblical, confessional and mythological dependent themes found in the likes of Robinson Jeffers, Sextus Propertius, Thomas Merton and Robert Graves strikes a spiritual chord to which I gravitate.
Novelists Ivan Doig, Milan Kundera, Naguib Mahfouz and Short Story writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa have each taught me about sentence structure, word combinations, designing colorful settings and the power of a heartbreaking paragraph. Doig’s novels: speech imitation and its graphic representation, the fine art of storytelling and all the wonders of a natural Montana. Mahfouz: color, I always feel like I am in an antique shop, replete with Oriental rugs, gold vases and old maps on a day that I received a pair of new glasses when I read him.
In Milan Kundera, I find beauty in his pages upon pages without a period: coherent streams of consciousness linked by the tragedies his characters live both in physical and intellectual war. Sentence brevity and the near pugilistic tone of Rey Rosa’s stories, cloaked in Latin American magical realism creates brief, urbane, and at times, understated literary gems. He is a master at quickly creating tension and fear.
I harbor a belief that any work of art needs intimacy and relevance, as defined by the consumer. And that poems can simply be constructions, figures, shapes and forms. My poems attempt to not only elucidate, but also educate. I have always wanted to give readers new answers to the same old questions.
My early poems fall prey to adolescent moral proselytizing. I was not able, in the words of Robert Frost, “to drop the eternal sublime,” at the heart of my work. Nor did I submit to the 20th century modernist style until circa 1999.
The evolution manifested itself over ten years; the catalyst was a novella I wrote while living in Brazil, coupled by the slow death of my estranged father. These two very different events brought about the necessary changes to create poems that lacked the archaic contrivances of youth and the purposeful attempts to cloud them in a language decipherable only by the poet. While writing the novella, I discovered that I had a penchant for creating settings and humorous dialogue—my father’s passing offered me my first opportunity to join the ranks of what I like to call ‘new urban realists,’ where dishes, dirty diapers and lawnmowers become equally viable subjects for poems as gardens, chivalry and God.
My newer work openly acknowledges common human faults, primarily the fear of failure, be it in matters of love, work, fatherhood or art. And nearly all my poems utilize symbolic imagery that I have had first-hand experience with: Guitars, Women, Brazil, New Mexico, Catholicism, the desert, the Midwest, Maine, lessons from sports, business and the playfulness that accompanies being a first-time father. This has all but eradicated the elusive, often unintelligible vernacular I created in my earlier work.
And now, we will wait and see what New Hampshire brings.
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