Green Migraine – Michael Dickman
Michael Dickman’s’s work really resonated with my loose, associative style that stems from my kind of schizophrenic poetics. His guttural, carnal imagery carries a kind of music that speaks to mundanity while reflecting on dimensions of moments, persons, and thought, all of which shaped the choppy, visceral language of my later writing.
Lucie Brock-Broido
I learned how to transform my sonics into lyricism thanks to Brock-Broido. Her use of blank verse and melodic language provided me with a means to corral the rapidity of my thoughts into song, which led me to toy with sound even more. catalogue of unabashed gratitude
Ross Gay
Ross Gay’s work shifted how I think about poetry in ways that I’m still grappling with. His ability to draw out the duration of a moment or thought–while equally drawing out the inverse in either–through extended sentences and run-on syntax that still land showed me that narrative poetry can still very much be constructed in a stream-of-consciousness style (a style that shows up in my current work).
Wallace Stevens
My first encounter with poetry that really resonated with me was Stevens. His phenomenological lens that assesses the mundane and transcendent gave me the language I needed to begin to craft my own voice into something beyond mere mimicry (though a lot of my early work clearly displays an affinity for Stevens’ style of writing).
Adrienne Rich
Following up Stevens, my encounters with Rich altered the landscape and tenor of my work. Her imagery and constructions, like Stevens, were rife with philosophical themes and I spent a long time dwelling on “Transcendental Etude” and the way in which it drifted through various conceptions of the self and change; this led me to examine the self in my work beyond mere binaries like Cartesian dualism.
Jake Bailey is a schizotypal confessionalist and the co-editor of poetry for Lunch Ticket. He has published or forthcoming work in Constellations, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Parentheses Journal, FlyPaper Magazine, The Laurel Review, Pidgeonholes, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. Twitter: @SaintJakeowitz