Dear Reader,
There are a few poets I keep close at hand, just to my left, on the upper shelf of my writing desk, squashed between a stack of notebooks and a tattered volume of The Complete Stories of Flannery O’ Connor lifted from the front porch of a Brooklyn brownstone. The poets go as follows: Wendell Berry, WH Auden, John Keats, Dante, and Seamus Heaney.
It’s Seamus’ work that I return to most often.
I remember reading his poem Digging in college. I was in the library, huddled on a brown leather chair with a jacket wrapped around me. I looked like a nesting bird, using the bits and bobs in reach to flesh out my nest. I came across the poem in an anthology, finding it was like striking gold. I poured over them repeatedly, surprised again and again as the words worked their magic. I had never been to Northern Ireland, I knew nothing of cutting turf and the wider world exposed in Heaney’s poem, but that didn’t matter, the words got at something more profound, and as I mouthed the final lines aloud, I felt like I knew Heaney and Heaney knew me.
I still go to Heaney with the same sense of awe and wonder. But now that I am a poet in my own right, a new feeling bubbles to surface when I read his work:
Jealousy. An acute sense of literary anxiety, as if his poetry was the Colossus of Rhodes and mine was akin to a clay sculpture at a child’s arts and crafts fair. It’s what Harold Bloom called the Anxiety of Influence. The tenuous relationships that exist between an artist and their forebearers, a mixed feeling of admiration and anxiety, desperate to overcome them while somehow acknowledging their ever-present shadows.
Lately, I’ve felt this anxiety more often than I used to. Part of me wants to stop reading, and the other part wants to stop writing altogether. But neither of those things is an option. There is only one course of action, to keep digging and, in the end, remember that some things grow better in the shade.
Wish me luck!
Recent Publications:
Check out some of my new poetry in Duck Head Journal’s Fall Issue.
Reading Recommendations:
Every Fall I make a reading list for myself, here’s what’s on it so far:
Victor Hugo, Les Miserable
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Seamus Heaney, Selected Poems (1966-1987)
Flanner O’ Conner, The Complete Stories
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Vol. 3
Writing Updates:
I had the chance to be interviewed by Writeresque and Forefront 360 about my new book Skipping Stones. You can check out those interviews in October. In those interviews, I talk a bit about my writing process and the inspiration behind my latest book.