Wednesday, June 10, 2009

VH1 List of Influences

Mark Tursi from Apostophe, which published my first book A New Quarantine Will Take My Place last year is going to get the Apostrophe Blog going. And to do so he's asked the people published by the press to send him their list of influences and current reading list. It took my a long time to finish the first list so the second one will come in a few days. I'll also try to take some time to explain each of these individually over the next few weeks:

Here is a list of my influences in no particular order (I'm leaving out things before the late 19th century and I'm trying to focus on just poetry):

Jean Genet, Our Lady of Flowers and Funeral Rites
Rimbaud, Illuminations and Season in Hell (New Directions)
Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (New Directions)
Aase Berg, all of them (Hos Radjur, Mork Materia, Forsla Fett, Uppland, Loss)
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Robert Motherwell (ed.), Dada Poets and Painters
Richard Huelsenbeck, Fantastic Prayers
Bruno K. Öijer, c/o Night
Lars Noren, Revolver
Öyvind Fahlström, Bord 1952-1955
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
Jack Kerouac, På Drift, De Underjordiska
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Wolfgang Borchert, "Do Stay, Giraffe"
Max Ernst, the comic books
Mina Loy, Love Song to Joannes
Vallejo, Trilce (all translations)
Antonin Artaud, everything (especially Theater and its Double and Eshleman's Watchfiends and Rackscreams)
Paul Celan (all the translations, Swedish and English)
Ann Jäderlund, Snart går jag i sommaren ut
Henri Michaux, Darkness Moves (trans. David Ball)
Henry Parland, Hamlet Sade Det Vackrare
Gunnar Björling, Där jag vet att du
Edith Södergran, everything
Vasko Popa, Homage to the Lame Wolf (trans. Simic)
Russel Edson, The Tunnel
Alice Notley, Descent of Alette
Ted Berrigan, Sonnets adn Bean Spasms
Frank O'Hara, the big book
John Berryman, Dreamsongs
Andre Breton (and Soupault), Magnetic Fields, Manifestoes of Surrealism
August Strindberg, Spöksonatan and The Occult Diary
Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines
TS Eliot, The Wasteland
Mayakovsky, Jag! (trans. Gunnar Harding)
Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems
Bataille, Visions of Excess
Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus
Auden, The Orators
Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto of 1909
Lautreamont, Maldoror
Gorilla (numbers 1&2, 1966 and 67)

8 Comments:

Blogger Amish Trivedi said...

I could say a lot about many of these, but I would love to read your thoughts on Berrigan's sonnets since you're the one that turned me on to them in the first place.

4:00 PM  
Blogger Ross Brighton said...

Some fantastic stuff there. I love Celan, he means a lot to me. As do Artaud and Deleuze and Guattari. I'm surprised Kurt Schwitters isn't on the list though.

5:50 PM  
Blogger Johannes said...

Schwitters is in the Motherwell anthology.

Johannes

7:15 PM  
Blogger Ross Brighton said...

Ah, yes, he would be. The Rothenberg and Joris volume of his work is fantastic as well.

7:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

nice!

9:22 PM  
Blogger John Wilkinson said...

Wonderful list, and what I don't know I'll have to read. How disturbing that I share so much of this, being decades your senior. I'd add J.H. Prynne, 'Brass' and 'Down where changed', John Wieners, 'Nerves' and 'Behind the State Capitol", Proust's inexhaustible book and Robert Musil, 'The Man Without Qualities'. And a tranche of English Romantic verse, and a handful of poems by Denise Riley and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. As for D&G before they went in for couture, reading The Anti-Oedipus as a graduate student was my single most overwhelming intellectual experience. (Too overwhelming, I should have read more critical theory first.)

9:14 AM  
Blogger Johannes said...

John,

I made the arbitrary decision to not include anything older than late 19th century. I guess Baudelaire/Rimbaud is the oldest. Otherwise I would of course the list would have been saturated with Shelley, Blake and Keats.

Johannes

9:25 AM  
Blogger Ross Brighton said...

Yes, blake. Swoon. I only just was introduced to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and am still assimilating her work- the concrete stuff and calligrams are amazing.

5:28 AM  

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