I'm appropriating this for poetry.

Five poetic influences, in rough chronological order

1. cummings (HS)
2. Keats (undergrad)
3. Milton (between)
4. Stevens (grad)
5. Bishop (grad & after)

Similarly, I don't like tagging people, but I think this is a cool exercise. https://twitter.com/AmneMachin/status/1285363623716585472

Of all these, I feel the least kinship with cummings. Perhaps no surprise since he's the oldest. I like his stuff enough, though I haven't read it in years.

But he opened me to seeing poetry as something playful, which opened me to a lot of the non-traditional stuff I like now

Keats really brought me heart to my love of poetry, aside from just innovation. I couldn't really read meter when I most loved him, but the Odes, Fall of Hyperion, his narrative pieces...it just all really resonated with me and definitively made me want to write.

I still do really like his stuff, but Keats is, I think someone you have to really fall in love with when you're under 25. But through Keats I fell in love with Rilke (who almost made this list) and (sort of) Stevens (who obviously loved Keats).

Milton I had read in undergrad both in an out of a wonderful class on him, but I didn't really fall in love with Milton until I was forced to teach poetry--and forced to teach meter.

Milton taught me how to read meter--and all the brilliantly clever things you can do with it--and all my first "real" poetry is just haunted by style (though many of them are bad, thankfully not via his inversions and whatnot).

And I still LOVE Milton. Maybe more than I should. Just everything about him. Reading him helped me appreciate Eliot, but more so, it brought me to Donne (who almost made this list), and it sent me back to reading with fresh eyes essentially all metrical poetry I read after.

I came to Stevens in graduate school with in a class with Paul Mariani. He was working on his biography. The course was excellent. We read it all, and I fell in love with Stevens' poetry. Aside from his ideas, which I find fascinating and helped me into more "difficult" poets...

Stevens' main influence on me was the ways he was played with meter. He helped me see a way out of my bad Miltonic stuff into a freer sort of blank verse. So much of my work now is structured in rhythms I learned to love from Stevens.

I came to Bishop as I finished graduate school. Her subtlety in dealing with, really, everything, appealed to me. Don't get me wrong, I like poets who are frank and open, but Bishop's attitude to her personal life really offered me a way to frame speaking of my own life.

Further, her humor and minute attention to concrete details (so much so that it almost becomes surreal in the early work at times) lead me backwards to Marianne Moore and forwards to John Ashbery and Jean Follain. All 3 of whom are major nodes that have led in fruitful directions

A note: though 3/5ths of these poets are American, this is just "most important on my poetry journey." The bulk of the poets I have read are British poets from Chaucer to, say Yeats.

I've been working really hard to "Americanize" "contemporarize" (?) and "internationalize" (outside of Europe) what I read. There are a number of American poets who I'm just now learning to love.