How does a farm boy become a poet? (How does anyone become a poet?)

I don't think there's any recipe for that, nor any curricular guide to make a poet out of any type of person. Farms, in fact, especially those in Kansas decades ago, do lend themselves to the poetic imagination. At least, to mine. The vastness of the sky, the ferocity of storms, the sounds and smells of a working farm: all grist for the imagination.

I've been writing poetry — or verse, at least — since I was 14 years old. A thunderstorm moved me to my first poem. Like most dabblers in poetry, I published poems in high school and college magazines, but those publications don't count for much. My first real publication was in South & West, a little magazine out of Ft. Smith, Arkansas, a poem for a girl I'd been dating.

Fortunately, while I had encouraging and supportive teachers, no one tried to tell me how to write poetry or critiqued any poems I showed them. With all due regard, they didn't have the basis to do those things. What teachers did do to help me was steer my reading. I have always been a text-addict: reading is a major part of my life.

The first poet I was really interested in was Dylan Thomas: both a good and a bad influence. I read a good book on Thomas' poetics (in high school) that taught me a lot about prosody. Thomas' poems are a dangerous model to imitate, but they certainly made me aware of sound and rhythm. Other poets I read early were W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and others. Louis Untermeyer's anthology, Modern American Poetry, had a lot of poems that influenced me. A little later, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were influences, along with Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, and others. Really, a listing of poets I've benefited from reading would be too long and misleading as well.

Music and visual arts also have influenced me a lot. I may write more about them another time, but for right now, I will mention, for music, The Big Bopper, Miles Davis, Duane Eddy, Bach, Vivaldi, Lionel Hampton, The Roots; and, for art, Dali, Picasso, Renoir, Monet, Oskar Kokaschko, Van Gogh. These lists aren't rankings, and they are not complete.

But, listen, Gino, what makes you an expert on the ghazal?

See the next page for that. I'd thought that would be the topic of this page, but it turned out differently than I'd expected. (A lot of stuff turns out different than expected.)