Well, Rachel, how about after the 70's?

Now, let's take a moment and ponder my influences who have received poetry awards post-2000:

Winner of The Salt Hill Poetry Award and The Barrow Street Poetry Prize (2000):
Rachel Zucker

Winners of The Walt Whitman Award:
(2006) Anne Pierson Wiese- Floating City
 (2007) Sally Van Doren- Sex and Noon Taxes 
 
 Winners of The Wallace Stevens Award:
 (2005) Gerald Stern

Winners of The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize:
(2006) Eleanor Lerman- Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds
 

Jordan asked me to write a poem about Christmas.

Up on the Rooftop.

This year, I let her know that I no longer believed. 
The halls, again decked in lights and temporal keepsakes; 
however, the Precious Moments nativity still claimed a 
Holy place above the TV. “What do you mean, you don’t believe?” 
Tearfully, she remembered the day she lost her St. Nick: 
half eaten cookies, empty bottle, drunken grandpa and the living room 
floor smelling of whiskey and pine needles. Last year he’d forgotten my
 chessboard. Before that, Michelle’s baby doll that could pee. 
“He’s just not the man I’d thought he would be.”

This year, I let her know that I no longer believed; 
however, I slept on the couch anyway. It wasn’t the clicking of
hooves that woke me, or the pleasant resonance of a laugh. No, 
it was the sensation of being lifted, or shaken – an impression I’m
not likely to forget. “So you think you can just forget about me, eh?” 
His breath reeked of venison and mulled cider. Sausage-link fingers dug
 beneath each of my armpits – he was keeping me far from the ground.
“Well, son, here’s some proof -- you know Santa won’t lie.” 
I simply couldn’t wait for a special surprise.

This year, I let her know that I no longer believed
in myself or the people who love me. When the jolly man placed me back on my
feet, he turned me around; I closed my eyes with delight. The wooden floor slightly 
moaned under the shift of his weight, a quick motion I could barely perceive. He bent me over his knee, pulled at my skivvies and slapped my ass with his big ham of a hand. “This. Is what. It means. To believe.” Each line accompanied by a matching 
flat-palm blow. Then a chuckle resounded. Jingle bells chimed.
 After looking up, he was gone.
Looking back now, I was wrong.

Joshua Beckman

JOSHUA BECKMAN

This loverly Thursday afternoon, Joshua Beckman gave a hypnotic reading in the TCNJ Library Auditorium. He performed for us three poems from Your Time Has Come, which was over in a matter of moments as the pieces are so short. It was his reading from Shake that was particularly interesting. He read through the entire first section of Shake, without skipping a poem or a beat. His pace and speech made each of the poems hypnotically ryhthmic, rocking back and forth or side to side as he spoke. While he read, certain themes became obviously important: the repetition, the sound choices, hands, wanting.

His work makes the ordinary and unoticeable into something extraordinary and important. Then many of his poems simply mock this importance. His work mocks modesty in its own humility. His words are seemingly about learning. The constant need to keep learning and moving. Wanting.

After the reading, he answered the questions just as we all thought he would: like a Rock Star.

He claimed that he spends years making the decisions concerning his collections. Nothing is done spur of the moment, and most of his work truly ends up on the cutting room floor. And when asked if being an editor has helped his work he said, " Probably not. It may hurt it, though!"

He was a good man, Charlie Brown. He enjoyed a cookie or two and made sure to sign every book we through at him.

That'll do pig.

On my Fall Break Vacation, I went to Witch Country!

1692

by Rachel Pinkstone

The room, stuffy and dated, filled
quickly with innocents and perspiration.
The voice behind us buzzed below within
our seats, charges vicious with intent.

The lights, dramatic, accusing, and timed,
poked like God’s angry finger at the damned.
The devil’s face flashed gruesome and waxen,
ready to take his heathens below.

They played loudly her voice as she cried 
out the lord’s prayers, “You are with the Devil,
now! The black man is at your back!”

Mr. Corey under boulders, Lady Nurse
dying behind bars, and the nudging
reminder to visit the gift shop. Kitchen-
witches and snow globes on sale.

We watch to learn tolerance.
We watch to avoid persecution.
We watched to receive the free Magick Wand.

Since this is a poetry kind of semester...

Here is a short moment listing my poetic influences pre- 1970:

1) Walt Whitman, of course- Leavse of Grass
2) Allen Ginsberg- Kaddish and Other Poems (1958-1960)
3) Marianne Moore- Collected Poems (1967)
4) Adrienne Rich- The Fact of a Doorframe (Poems 1950-1984), Leaflets (1965-68)
5) Elizabeth Bishop- The Complete Poems (1927-1979)
6) Gary Snyder- Back Country (1968), Regarding Wave (1869)

Fin.

Sometimes don't you just want a hot cup of Haiku?

“Fall(ing)”

Up high in the sill
the man in the pin-striped suit
sways calm in the breeze.


“Rent”

She opens them one
by one. Lays them on the desk.
He will never come.


“Five”

Struggling with words,
this language is new for him.
Remember he is young.


“Dow”

Money, paper, pens.
If it falls again, will we?
Try not to invest.


“Stephen-cat”

I reflect the light
on the floor. He likes to play
with his own shadow.

This one, I plan to fight for...

CHRISTINE SCHUTT

Christine Schutt is a novelist and short story writer who received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then, later, her MFA from Colombia University. Currently, Schutt lives in New York City where she is an English teacher at the Nightengale-Bamford School, an all girl prep-school. I suppose I find this so interesting because most of us only get to study under our writing idols once we've already labored through High School and most of college, but not these girls, OH NO, they get it that luxury even before they get their lisences. 

Schutt is also the senior editor of the annual literary periodical published by Diane Williams, NOON.

Her published works include:

Nightwork (1996)

Florida (2004)

A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (2005)

All Souls (2008)

Schutt is a Pushcart and O'Henry Prize winning author and was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction, and Nightwork, a collection of  short stories was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement. Her writing is raw, inviting and familiar, the kind of writing where you want to look away because it has gotten to you from within, but when you try to put it down, you simply cannot. You just won't.

"Another boy, another car, she used to let him feel her up just so long as she could sleep. 'The night shift,' she said to her father, 'is such a bitch. You're always tired. I can't talk,' she said, and she kissed her father. She opened her mouth to him and worried her hand inside his coat and felt the warm damp of his shirt, the hard back and heat of her father." ~You Drive

REVIEWS:

"In the opening piece, 'You Drive,' a grown daughter and her father cross the boundaries of any usual parent-child relationship as they sit in a car, sharing secrets, kissing and memorizing the smell and texture of one another's skin."

~Kirkus Reviews

"Shor through with [Virginia] Woolf's lyrical, restless spirit...A bold, sharp story about teenage girls, class and illness, about those moments when we achieve the miracle of human condition--and those when we don't."

~Maud Casey, New York Times Book Review

"Schutt's writing is sharp as ever, with a keen eye for life's everyday grotesqueries...Schutt continues to capture the messiness and confusions particular to adolescence, but in All Souls, new terrain refreshes this writer's astringent voice."

~Christopher Schmidt, Time Out New York

Exercising my Creativity?

“79”
by Rachel Pinkstone

Prologue
The door, unusually open, gushed a flood of welcoming light 
no more inviting than the torrent of expectation behind it. Nine months 
since this threshold was passed last. Nine months of promises made
 into a solid ball of guilt, hard against my stomach. The doorbell 
had the same old chime, that tune we all know, but can’t recollect.  
Her eyes (wrinkled by irritation and our hesitance to walk right in) met 
each our matching set of baby blues. That look said so many things: 
surprise, relief, anger, maybe joy.

Chapter One 
How’syourmother?Whendidyouchangeyourhair?Didweknowyouwerecomingthistime?Whendidyouloseallthatweight?Haveyougottenarealjobyet?Isthereamaninyourlife?Didweknowyouwerecomingthistime?Whenwillyoubringusgrandkids?Whyhaven’tyoucalled?WillweseeyouatThanksgiving?HowaboutChristmas?Didweknowyouwerecomingthistime?Don’twealwaysseeyouatChristmas?Didyouthinkwe’dforgetyourbirthday?Didweknowyouwerecomingthistime?

Chapters Two through Twelve
The clink and tap of utensils, fork against plate, metal vs. porcelain,
was deafening. Aunt ---‘s new crown, third molar in back, twice now replaced, 
made audible effort to bite. Uncle --- gargled his mashed potatoes, 
coughed after a swallow. We watched him for struggle; returned to our meal. 
Grandpa maneuvered his food; turkey slid into place, biscuit rumbled off the plate, 
green beans squelched under the force. I only stirred my drink, repeatedly, 
the ice played like bells. A forty-minute orchestration instrumented, 
entirely, by of our digestion.

Chapter Thirteen

Promisemeyou’llvisitmore,Wewon’tbearoundforever,sometimesIforgetmymedication,Muslimsmovedinacrossthestreet,Promisemeyou’llvisitmore,Ihavetopinchtherosebushbeforethefirstfrost,Rememberwhenweboughtyouthatbike?Promisemeyou’llvisitmore,Didyouseemetakethecolaseorthexanax?Rememberthatweloveyou,Promisemeyou’llvisitmore.

Epilogue
The door closed, unusually, behind us. 

The Hermit: Gary Lutz

Gary Lutz
Gary Lutz is a fiction writer and a poet who has had pieces published in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, New York Tyrant, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Unsaid, Fence, StoryQuarterly, Slate Magazine, , Noon, The Apocalypse Reader PP/FF: An Anthology, The Random House Treasury of Light Verse and several others that I am sure I have forgotten. Besides writing, Gary Lutz fills his time as a Professor of Composition and English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greenburg.
Gary Lutz has a writing style the sounds, more often than not, that you are right inside the mind of the characters, analyzing not only the world around them, but all the internal nonsense we tend to forget we are thinking, making us realize how similarly odd we all are.

Lutz has a few collections published, including:

Stories in the Worst Way (1996, republished in 2002)
I Looked Alive (2003)
Partial List of People to Bleach (chapbook, 2007)


 “Then I did a dumb thing. I moved into an apartment house and grew concerned that the person living in the unit above mine was following me, upstairs, from room to room. For much of the day, my life would be down to just this one concern. I would walk from the living room to the bedroom, or from the kitchen to the bathroom--I had just those four rooms, in that order--and there this person would be, right overhead, the footfalls clumpy but companionate, solicitous . . . Sooner or later it dawned on me that this person had divined how things were laid out in my rooms . . .” ~ “Devotions,” Stories in the Worst Way 
“Did I ever worry about the smell when I was passing out handouts in class? Because all I did was pass out handouts and read them out loud, then collect them and dismiss the class. None of it would be on the test. There were no tests—just papers. Not essays, themes, reviews, reports, compositions, critiques, research projects—but papers, sheets of paper, stapled together. I’d lightly pencil a grade in the upper right-hand corner, and that would be it—no comments or appraisals subjoined in authoritative swipes of a felt-tip pen. I made sure no telltale signs—spilled coffee, dog-ears, creases, crumples, crimps, fingerprint grime—would lead students to believe that their papers had ever been read. “~Slops,” Stories in the Worst Way

REVIEWS:
”His characters spend their time enduring the weight of everyday life, dwelling on the minutiae of their own neuroses. In a story titled “Slops,” a college professor with colitis maps out all the campus bathrooms in a small notebook. In another, a man passes out pamphlets and gives forty-five-minute presentations (with charts) in search of a prospective wife. Lutz labors at each meticulous sentence, word by word, to create a language of striking insight, peripheral emotions, and reinvented vocabulary.”
—Ross Simonini, The Believer
Gary Lutz is the best writer you've never heard of. To certain stylists, he's a kind of prose god. Lutz belongs to a category of sentence geniuses that includes Ben Marcus, Aleksandar Hemon, and David Foster Wallace. 
--Christopher Frizzelle, The Stranger

Influence driven Poetry.

"Superheroes"

by Rachel Pinkstone

He emptied his pockets to show
me what he was Worth.
A dirty Quarter from 1978, the year 
his mother was born.
Used tissues, slightly sticky, bloodied,
wadded into a ball.
A Rock, thought an arrowhead,
still enveloped in dirt.
A Note to the nurse, a claim
his dosage had changed.
A Spider-Man tattoo, temporary,
but perpetually his hero.

“I like Spider-Man too. Can’t say
I’m a fan of Mary-Jane.”
He eyed me first, amassed his wealth
and laughed. Turned away, then left 
the classroom, 
Smiling, coughing 
hard on the way out.

Call me Dreamer...

Mary Gaitskill

“It seemed to me that I was just writing about things that people deal with pretty regularly.  I mean, not everybody has a boss that spanks them for typing mistakes, but many people have experienced the cruelty of office politics…”

 ~Mary Gaitskill responding to her predilection for the “dark side.”

           It is Mary Gaitskill’s effortless ability to make her reader feel shamelessly excited and utterly uncomfortable with the honesty of her prose that has kept her in constant rotation with my favorite authors since the first time I opened Bad Behavior. For those of you who do not know, The 2002 film starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Secretary, was based off a piece from that collection, and it provided little justice to the characters’ audacity and distance.
           A Kentucky native who has lived her life in myriad places, a good deal of which spent in New York City when it was an epicenter of the AIDS era, has published work in The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998), The New Yorker, Esquire and Harper’s Magazine. She was also written several well-received novels and short story collections:
Bad Behavior (1988)
 Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991)
Because They Wanted To (1997)
Veronica (2005)
          Her bold writing style had led us to survey prostitutes turning tricks, strippers, abortion, lesbians, shut ins, and sadomasochists Her own salacious past of exploration may have even offered insight to her work, “Gaitskill herself seemed like a character from her own pages. She too was a downtown girl and a waif, someone who had cashed out her twenties on a series of sexual improvisations. She’d sold flowers in San Francisco as a teenage runaway and worked as a stripper and a call girl.” No matter how or why her characters developed, her strength lies in the honesty that she provides with writing these stories. She is unapologetic and inspirational to all writers who want to tell you that story that you’re afraid to say yourself.

“The lawyer was a short man with dark, shiny eyes and dense immobile shoulders. He took my hand with an indifferent aggressive snatch. It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let go.” “Secretary,” Bad Behavior.

“He turned the edge of one nostril over with his thumb and nervously stroked his nose hairs with one finger. He knew it was a nasty habit, but it soothed him. When Kitty was a little girl he would do it to make her laugh. ‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘do you think it’s time we played with the hairs in our nose?’ And she would giggle, holding her hands against her face, eyes sparkling over her knuckles.” “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” Because They Wanted To.

 Yager, Carri Anne. “Mary Gaitskill: Critics Line up to Get Her Wrong.” College Crier Online.
Nussbaum, Emily. "Mary, Mary, Less Contrary," New York Magazine, Nov. 14, 2005