Thread: Poetry Garbage/Influences

In what I consider to be a crime against beauty, art, culture...and all things holy, I was FORCED to relegate two volumes of my absolute favorite poetry to the garbage this weekend.

I was moving to my new place and had a trunk full of literature from DeLillo to Achebe, poetry from Bishop to Komunyakaa, and magazines from Esquire to Harper's. The trunk, despite being rescued from a dumpster in college, was one of my favorite possessions because of the value that lay within.

In my transition, however, a MOLD developed inside the trunk, and Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems and Jimmy Santiago Baca's Black Mesa Poems - two of my most favorite volumes of poetry by two of my favorite poets - had to be thrown out. The Maximus Poems is a very large (and expensive) volume, and had every single note on every single poem that I acquired throughout college. Same with Baca's - I had scribbled notes on nearly every page. Totally engulfed in black mold spores, thus totally useless.

What symbolism (and madness) is this?!?

As a side note, anyone else influenced by these poets? Who are your main influences?

It obviously was an exciting read for the fungus, it reproduced so more could read it, inadvertently damaging your books at the same time. You should keep the fungus, as a reminder of the poetry.

Influences --> Probably the greats of philosophy that provoked a lot of thought, poetry does this in it's own way. It's the style I use anyway. Even if a philosopher didn't write poetry, he could still be an influence in his own right, in an artistic way if that makes sense.