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1 Introduction There’s a painting that Diego Rivera completed when he was thirteen years old—an obvious imitation of Monet’s Water Lilies. Rivera’s work is often associated with folk art, or with depictions of historical events and political themes. Although he is not typically considered to be a technically sophisticated painter, a scan of his juvenilia reveals other strikingly precise imitations of iconic work from various and wildly different artistic movements. Clearly, Rivera should be reconsidered. He made deliberate choices in his murals of industry and in his later paintings of rural life, in the primitive rendering of a hand or the angular lines in a body or the impressionistic brushstrokes in a bundle of flowers. Imagine how Rivera had begun, learning from the great masters, learning multiple methods to render a landscape, a still life, a human figure; from there, he discovered how best to paint his subject. He discovered his own style. The idea that art itself can be the artist’s best teacher is one of the initial sources of inspiration for this book. One would only need to read Homer and Virgil and Dante, the letters between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, to recognize the long tradition of poets mentoring and inspiring poets. But the lines of influence, in a modern world, might be difficult to identify. Thus, we started our project with an open call and then later invited poets—friends, teachers, strangers whose work and approach we admired—past, present and future mentors to us all, to consider the poems that most influenced and inspired them. Our hope was to see the lines of influence within their work and, in the process, to see how they came to understand different elements of poetry. Their responses explore pace and punctuation, repetition and myth, voice, audience, and form, among other subjects. The poets then present writing prompts as well as example poems, challenging readers to discover their own insights into various literary principles. Many of the writers here consider how one particular poem has in- fluenced and informed their understanding of poetry. For example, in )DOFRQHU,QWURLQGG $0 introduction 2 “Recording Mortal Sight: The Drama of Prosody,” Phillis Levin addresses the elasticity of blank verse by looking at a poem by Anthony Hecht, while Lisa D. Chávez turns to Jim Daniels’s “How” to identify the possibilities of narrative in her own poems. Several poets also remind us that mentorship often comes from sources far outside the written world. David Keplinger looks to a city and its ancient architecture, and also to his own early theater training, as he contemplates ways to both muffle and unveil emotion in his poems. Kevin Prufer likewise finds answers to the problem of prosody in the darkness of a movie theater as he views Stanley Kubrick’s classic A Clockwork Orange. Prufer then applies this new understanding of the potentially discordant relationships between music and meaning to the unmistakable and ever-enduring musical score of Emily Dickinson. On another note, Stephen Dunn teaches us to learn from—and mentor— ourselves, to return to our poems not as writers but as readers. Wallace Stevens states that some write poetry “because one is impelled to do so by personal sensibility and also because one grows tired of the monotony of one’s imagination, say, and sets out to find variety.”1 Drawing upon the work of others, a host of different traditions, experiences, and sensibilities, our poets (and essayists) introduce new ideas and approaches to writing poems, from formal verse to political verse, even re-envisioning concepts we take for granted, such as metaphor, reconsidered in “Lookalikes ” by Stanley Plumly. They also demand that the readers expand what they know, not only to stretch the imagination but to do so with flair and craft and understanding. Deirdre O’Connor, for example, contemplates the uncanny in a lyric poem, and her writing prompt challenges readers to lose themselves, to allow the poem (and the poet) to unravel. Section one asks readers to broaden their understanding of figurative language, image, setting, narrative, persona, and lyricism. The anthology begins with Patricia Clark’s “Double Vision: The Tactic of Indirection in the Lyric Poem,” which not only responds to the surrounding world but also asks the poet to create “tension through details and specifics” in a lyric poem. Stanley Plumly, Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, and Victoria...

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