Seamus was here with me in Middlebury before he died. So, we talked a lot about Frost for years. In fact, Seamus was really influenced by Frost. Seamus Heaney’s poetry with its focus on Northern Ireland and locality, for example, influenced me. I was also interested in poetry’s themes. I moved towards poetry that made a real sound, a physical sound. I was very influenced by reading Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, even TS Elliot in certain cases. To think in terms of a more concrete, physical language. What are some of the tenets you learned that helped your poetry improve in the early stages? I published my first book at a small Scottish press in 1972, a long time ago. There was a great revival of Scottish poetry in the early seventies, and I was very lucky to be there in a circle of some major writers.īy then, I was writing poetry with a passion. He came and stayed with me a couple of times in Scotland. I used to go and stay with him in Dublin, and I'd sent him my poems and we’d write back and forth. And I met Seamus Heaney who was incredibly influential to me early on. During my time there, I connected with a lot of Scottish poets.Īnne Stevenson was my mentor then, a great poet. While I went back briefly to Lafayette to get my undergraduate degree, I was soon back at St. Then I started reading some of the more modern poets, contemporary poets. He helped me to properly read Yeats and Hopkins. Andrews for my junior year abroad, I met a great professor there, Anthony Ash. Then I started reading TS Elliot and the other usual poets, Whittier and Longfellow, Whitman and Dickinson.īy the time I got to college, I was actively writing poetry-terrible poetry. I remember reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” When I read the line, “The only other sound’s the sweep / of easy wind and downy flake,” I thought, Whoa, language can affect you in a visceral way. Then, when my ninth-grade English teacher gave me some poems by Robert Frost, I was amazed. I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and I didn't really know anything about poetry. When did you start writing poetry? What was your path? Your career across poetry, literature, criticism and film has been so rich, and we want to learn about its beginnings. As he explains poetry’s core-thinking in images-Parini also shares what makes a great poem and how we can find our voices. His own circle has included writers like Seamus Heaney, Jorge Luis Borges, Julia Alvarez, and Gore Vidal.

It's making visible what’s invisible elsewhere.” Maybe this sanity comes, too, from the literary communities we create. Because poetry is really keeping us sane. But I always describe poetry as finding a language adequate to emotions and that adequacy interests me. Drawing from his expansive career, Jay Parini says, “People say a poet must be crazy.

Jay parini borges