So I want to acknowledge the influence of two teaching poets, Skip Fox and Carolyn Forche, on my fiction writing. They really don’t hang out in the same prose very often. Because Skip was interested in my husband’s poetry he was tolerant of me, and when he found me browsing through the library stacks at the University of southwestern Louisiana (now UL), he pointed me towards the works of Kathy Acker, Leslie Scalapino, and all those amazing folks included in Andrei Codrescu’s Up Late anthology. Later, after encountering Forche (yes, skip is skip and Carolyn is Forche, even though I am closer to her than him), she too cited Scalapino and French surrealists, making us use all the toys of chance composition available in Behn and Twitchell’s amazing The Practice of Poetry. These exposures were more memorable, and so I assume more significant, to my most recent writing than say, Best American Stories, or my conversations with fiction writers during the same time.
And speaking of writers in dialogue, I’m going to try to go on an HTMLGIANT dot com diet, see if I can’t go the whole weekend without checking in on the laddish banter, which is starting to creep me out and certainly distract me. For example, the Sam Pink urgency may have gotten to the point where they will start posting recipes on how to cook him for Thanksgiving. And now we’ve come to my point: I wanted to put Pink, Fox, and Forche in my labels.
Off to ride my bike along the C&O, then back to the cabin to work on the novel.
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