Do you have authors, poets, painters that you learn from? I'm not asking for favorites here. I'm asking if there are any authors that you learn things about writing from. Things about art, about expression. Do you have any?
I've read Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, the original beat poets. Alan Ginsberg's 'Hum Bomb' did it for me, I think. It really taught me, I suppose, that poetry was meant for reading out loud. When you hear 'Hum Bomb', hear it live, it's so amazingly out there. There is raw emotion and anger and exasperation. But if you read it, it's absolute nonsense. Two lines repeated throughout entire pages of stuff. There was a poetry contest hosted by the county-wide library branches that sent out a book of the winning poetry to all the winners, and I got one. There are a few writers in there, some darling kids, who wrote so amazingly. And you learn things. You learn that poetry is not a way of writing.
Fiction-wise, everything good I read, I learn from. At this point, I'm still learning, so you could probably pick out authors from my style here and there. Here's Cunningham in The Hours; oh, this is Pahlaniuk's Fight Club; this is Tolkien, this is Pratchett. Etc. I think the more you read the more you begin to understand that everything you have ever written up to this point has already been done and said and done and said better.
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