KIM ADDONIZIO: When I think about role models, it's funny-- I wasn't writing then, but I when I think about Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, who were a couple of the singer-songwriters of my generation, that my generation listened to, I realize how much of that came into my poetry later when I started writing poetry, just because I heard people using language in an interesting way. I didn't grow up with poetry. I didn't grow up with literature. Well, I read a lot of novels. But I didn't know anything about poetry.
So I realized later that listening to Joni Mitchell's lyrics, listening to Bob Dylan's lyrics gave me some kind of sense of language that was powerful-- Dylan because he just wrote about all kinds of things really beautifully and Joni Mitchell because she seemed so personal. And I think everybody who-- every kid who had the-- especially young girl who had the album Blue-- at the time, that just sort of became an anthem. And you felt like those things were about you. And I think that later, that was really important to me to write things that were kind of about myself but about other people as well or about those sort of deeper feelings that we all have and some of the not-so-great feelings we have and trying to work through those.
So weirdly, singer-songwriters were actually an influence. And I didn't even realize it at that time. But I know that they probably had a big effect later when I started to write poems.