[New-Poetry] Anxiety of Influence

[Alexander Dickow]

Jim,
I think influences tend to be post-facto. So much so,
in fact, that I've taken to indicating intertexts for
certain poems -- intertexts I invariably first
discovered *after* I wrote the poems. The other kinds
of influence -- ie, the poets central to the
development of my sensibility -- tend to be figures
with radically different esthetics than my own (and
not simply a reverse-image or inversion of my poetics:
not a simple matter of killing Dad, as far as I can
tell). The figures I'm most consistently compared to
-- Lewis Carroll, EE Cummings, Joyce -- are authors
with whose work I'm terribly unfamiliar.
All of these factors, to my mind, make the notion of
influence little better than a phantom. 
Amicalement,
Alex

www.alexdickow.net/blog/
   
  les mots! ah quel désert à la fin
  merveilleux. -- Henri Droguet