DON MORRILL: Well, I think the early ones for me were probably the ones that are the usual role models for young writers. And that would be teachers that you admire, people who, in their own way validate your longings, your literary, your vague or unformed literary longings, your excitement about writing.
If you are in a world that isn't particularly artful or isn't particularly given to acknowledge the importance of writing and art-- a writer always feels a little bit like an exile in the world, the indifferent world. But if that's a situation that you're in your more intimate life, your familial life, it's very important to have someone like a teacher be able to validate by what they care about that this matters.
I think this one of the important things that teachers do. They provide an embodiment of permission, shall we say. It's OK for you to care about this, this is valuable things. These are valuable things to care about.
I think also you start to the first poets that you encounter. Some of the first poets I encountered were really in many ways on my own. One summer in my mid-teens I spent a lot of time at the local swimming pool. And across the parking lot from the swimming pool was a branch library. And so I would go over there, and I would hang out.
This was after the eureka moment with the typewriter. I would go over there after some hours at the pool, and I would just go through the poetry stacks. And I was an indiscriminate reader, but I was looking for something.
And so I can remember Robert Graves, for example. I wanted to write little lyric poems like Robert Graves. Or picking up things like The Love Song, with J Alfred Prufrock and reading it and not knowing at all what it was about but it was sounding so beautiful. "Till human voices wake us, and we drown." What is that about? But fantastic.
So I think those were key formative influences. Coming to find out that there were poets alive, not all poets were dead was extremely important just by the virtue of their vitality, their being. Again, that gave me permission to feel like this was something.
By the time I got to college, OK, I was majoring in economics, but I was still writing poems, and the poems were the real life. And so that real life was worth keeping. Later I certainly have had great mentors. Donald Justice was one of my former teachers. He was my dissertation director.
And probably one of the key poets for me as a younger person in my 30s was Czeslaw Milosz. Somebody with that kind of majestic sweep and that deep humanity and that imagistic precision in a philosophical breadth, that's what that poet pointed to was something that I hadn't, at that point, understood about what ambition would be. Basho says, don't imitate the poets, seek what they sought.
So that's what finally I saw in Milosz and Basho and others, as well. So those are all influences. Every good poem I read is influence.