September 1981 Cover Image

The House that Jack Built

Article Image

Russell Banks
When Kathy Walton wrote and suggested that I join a colloquy on the topic, Influences, I felt "enormously humbled"-and immediately I started planning a slide show, for that is what I would have done, had I not later been sufficiently (rather than enormously) humbled. I would have driven from my house in Northwood, New Hampshire, the dozen or so miles to Barnstead, New Hampshire, where I spent most of my childhood, and there I would have photographed the speckled, cracked ceiling of a second floor bedroom in an old farmhouse, the mouth of a culvert that crossed beneath the dirt road at Shackford Corners, and a dead rock-maple tree on the lip of a sand pit.
Read more...


Respondent's Report

Michael Ryan
Frank Kermode says that "'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is arguably Eliot's most influential essay," And probably the most influential single sentence in that essay is the one exhorting the poet to write "with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and proposes a simultaneous order."
Read more...


Panel on Influence: Introduction

AWP Editor
The following pieces, by Marvin Bell, Russell Banks, and James Tate, were presented at the A WP Annual Meeting in Seattle, April 4, 1981. Marvin Bell, who teaches at the University of Iowa, is on leave for the fall semester to teach at the University of Hawaii. "About Influence" will appear in a book of essays and interviews to be published by the University of Michigan Press in its Poets on Poetry Series.
Read more...


Panel on Influence: About Influence

Article Image

Marvin Bell
In thinking about influence, I had a considerable amount of anxiety, but I decided to do something anyway. I have three possible titles for this possible paper: "Influence: Becoming Ourselves"...or: "Influence? or Dumb Luck?"...or: "Influence: The Inescapable."
Read more...


Move to Yugoslavia?

Article Image

James Tate
"Influence" is a curiously intimate topic. And it's true that while writers are asked about their influences with annoying frequency, naming names doesn 't really satisfy. I appreciate very much my fellow panelists' references to their childhoods and to particulars of experience that helped shape their characters. The smell of autumn leaves burning may serve as a sensory touchstone and a key to the past, but it does not make you a writer.
Read more...