That's from a rather pompous and silly review of Generation Txt, which I edited, by cultural reactionary David Bowden (the majority of reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and certainly more sensible).

Any thoughts?

Any non-literary - or at least non-poetic - influences to confess?

I'm not sure how music influences my work but I do know particular musicians/bands get me err, going, as it were, as do particular poets (I find re-reading Charles Simic in particular has the same effect).

There's something about Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians that always inspires me to write poetry. On the two occasions I’ve seen it live, I’ve gone home with a cracking headache because my brain is trying to process so much. I'd also cite Joanna Newsom, Saint Etienne, Francoise Hardy, The Fieldmice and Mark Kozelek as musicians who have somehow contributed to what and how I write although I'm not sure it would be evident in the final content of poems.

What's so worrying about non-poetic influences?

Nice to find a fellow Steve Reich fan :-)

Have you heard his latest offering The Daniel Variations? I almost bought it yesterday, but it's received mixed reviews.

Oh that's just silly. Of course we we can only benefit from cross-fertilisation between different art forms. 'About suffering they were never wrong/The old masters' etc etc Perhaps the reviewer was suggesting that the poets were not very well read, and knew more about music and the visual arts than poetry? How could he know that?

I am glad of the inspirational influence of many painters, especially Monet, Kandinsky, Miro and Picasso, Jackson Pollock. Louise Bourgeois' recent exhibition was a recent shot in the arm. Apart from the intangible effects (colour, mood, forinstance), it's their tenacity, originality and courage that pushes me along.

that's a lot of painters jacqueline! people (critics, whoever) often speak of the 'painterly quality' of so-and-so's poetry... what do you think of that?

i tend to think it's always rather more difficult to trace such things. i would love to see the music of palestrina and godspeed you! black emperor as instrumetnal in my development as a writer, but the reality is - that's just what i listen to when i'm 'in the mood' :-)

Going back to the source - only two of the six poets mention musical artists (Rufus Wainwright and Talib Kweli) and only one mentions visual artists (David Shrigley and Banksy).

Have I ever mentioned that the level of criticism in this country is too often D-list?

But this brings up the more important question of whether our doughty 'radicals' who have clawed into tenure in the far climes ought to be grooming young writers to come flashing their blades at the 'so-called so-called establishment' which has been common in recent years.

I've talked before, with only half a tongue in my cheek, about having to 'de-cult' young poets when they escape the outer camps of the poetic empire, raving against Faber, the Arts Council and spitting when Paterson and O'Brien are mentioned.

It's part of the rite of passage as a young / new poet that you try your hand at a few reviews and inevitably there are some, many, who make old hands cringe - I did it too. I like the way Luke Kennard has Houdini'd himself from this by admitting to the sin, and being an altogether more interesting critic - positive and negative - now he has blunted his horns a little.

The point, beyond being adversarily catty, is that too many young poets come out of CW camp thinking they must kick against the pricks when, of course, they are mostly 'pricks' themselves. For every younger poet who's a bit different and does not conform (by aesthetics rather then by attitude), there are poets who sense their work will disappear unless they flap their arms a bit and cause a scene - remember Thumbscrew? - and who ask us to excuse their own pedestrian verse because they are carrying on the vendetta of some rouged lecturer or don who has touched their locks with his prejudice.

Sadly, poets are a fickle bunch and kind reviews, reading invitations and career opportunities don't come thick and fast for those who have set themselves up as attack puppies.

;)

Some non-literary influences:

Gyorgy Ligeti
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Bela Bartok
Ali Farka Toure
Toumani Diabate
Tom Waits
Blind Willie Johnston
Ma Rainey
Oumou Sangare
Orchestra Baobab

Most of my most important infuences are non-literary, I would have thought. Aren't everyone's?!

I would have thought so too, but when I had a good hard think about it some hours ago, I couldn't really isolate what sort of influence, if any, had come from, say, Michael Nyman, Max Ernst or Jeffrey Kacirk. Other non-literary influences, for example, drowning, New York City, pinball and Chinese food made more sense.

Obviously, lyricists are writers nonetheless, and some songwriters writing at the moment could easily be excellent poets as well. Owen Pallett, Colin Meloy, and Joanna Newsom are three particularly "poetic" songwriters I'm proud to name amongst my influences - hell, I wish I'd written some of their lines!

How do you actually guage non-literary influence? I mean, I listen to a lot of jazz these days (check out the new Neil Cowley Trio album -Loud Louder Stop - brilliant) and I used to listen to (and still do punk), post-punk, soul, all kinds of stuff - but how can I say that I'm "influenced" by Thelonious Monk, for instance? Is it something in my rhythms? In the way my writing jumps about from subject to subject?

How about art? - Jackson Pollack, the St Ives artists, Gillian Ayres - I love them all, and maybe it affects what I think I can get away with with words (use of space, perhaps) but I don't see it as some kind of easy connection.

I think I'm probably as influenced by growing up in the shadow of Pendle Hill as I am by music & art.

'people (critics, whoever) often speak of the 'painterly quality' of so-and-so's poetry... what do you think of that?'

Not sure about 'painterly' poems. I don't think that's what I meant. It is quite intangible, the way that someone's work might influence you. And there are a lot of painters on that list; I'm certainly greedy for the art that I love. It's just that seeing that kind of art, those outpourings of a combination of technical skill and naked creativity just makes me want to write, just the same way that reading certain poets or listening to music makes me want to write.

Steve, thanks for this, I'm a big NCT fan and had no idea this was out.

Well, I always say to writers the most important thing is to actually have a life. It comes back to James' remark on another thread about trusting work in relation to someone's age (by which I understood him to mean they've lived a little -- like "being returned to the community"). You've got to have had a life, and this is the worrying thing about poetry emerging from institutional confines.

There are, crudely, two distinct colleges (we might say) the institutional avant-garde and the CW hordes. The former must be left wing, have a strong background in Marxist and post war French critical theory and show a commitment to non-mainstream segregation (and have strong links across the pond with liberal US democrats and anti-globalisation drones). They're largely self segregating and are to my mind a theocracy. Talent breaking is largely about institutional advocacy and the circles of approval are quite tiny. The avant-garde is largely a community embedded in HE/FE institutions and has very little life outside of it.

The CW community is more concerned with tenure, personality and identity, coterie and campus politics. MFA clone wars seem to breed new campus poets who are rarely known outside of P&W politburo approval. "Chantelle Füsser-Kucinski's eighth collection 'The Horse Pond Eclogues' is a colorful and intransigent wandering through Arkansas ... Chantelle is Herbert Gristman Professor of Creative Writing at Knightsville College, Kentucky."

The career paths are easy to caricature, and perhaps its unfair to single out poets in this way, when musicians could be similarly walloped into their MySpace pages and Battle of the Bands in those lucrative and savvy havens like Lowestoft.

Committing sin of multiple posting.

If you haven't read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace, I'd read it for the depiction of a poet in "Death is not the End". It's quite marvellous.

I can sympathise with this, Steven. Place is the single most significant influence on my work, though that influence mainly operates in obscure ways.

To take one middlingly explicable example: what word would it be for a variant of synaesthesia where you associate certain places with certain basically unrelated ideas, texts, sensations? The death of Socrates, for instance, equates to a line of mature trees at the edge of my primary school playground. Does everyone get this?

But I don't just mean that - also the development of sensibility, identity, theme etc etc are all based in place and landscape, as far as I'm concerned.

No. It's just you, you strangely-talented weirdo...

I think, though, Tony, that 'place' almost certainly plays a large part in your poems. The necks of so many organic things in your lines are described as 'swollen', and you often use the word 'iodine', as if hungering for it.

<runs away, cackling>

Me too; London, specifically. And also artistic/cultural/political responses to place. I'm a big Sinclair fan, of course (fiction and non), but I'm also influenced by urban semiotics and other theoretical approaches to urban landscaping. I guess it's just about being open to a fluid dialogue with multiple traditions.

I do this, occasionally. I have absolutely no academic understanding of how memory - and the brain in general - works but I would imagine it's not that unusual to associate places with ideas as well as 'memories'. In the same way that I can still associate particular poems of my own with the places where I wrote them, or relationships I was in at the time, or even other things I was reading around the time of composition - not necessarily connected with the poem itself.

Okay, so I'm odd too. :D

I'll have you know I had a trout for lunch, so my collar buttons are safe for at least a week. Except, come to think of it, trout's a freshwater fish, so.... <FLUMMMFF>

I've noticed that the artists from my area of Lancashire that I really admire (Geraldine Monk, Harrison Birtwhistle, Jeanette Winterson and the artist John Virtue) all have a somewhat nonrealistic, sideways glancing way of approaching the world, as if they've all been touched a bit by one of those witches...

And no, were nowt like writers from Yorkshire, tha knaws. We're better.

Jamie and the Magic Torch
Banksy
Damien Hirst
Hong Sang Su
Hong Sung Dam
Oasis (the film)
Arvo Part
Distant (the Turkish film)
Tom Waits
Bob Dylan
Death Cab for Cutie
Beethoven
Sex Pistols
The Raconteurs
Babyshambles
Shostakovich 10
Ken Loach
Mike Leigh
Pollock
Warhol
Miles Davis
Antonioni (esp. The Passenger)
The Goonies
Donnie Darko
Satie
Paradise Now

...all come to mind (this week... 'Jamie...', Tom, Bob, Satie and Beethoven are constants however... but it's all a bit wishy-washy the definition... I mean I saw a lot of things today on the street that probably had just as much influence on me in the short term that Satie has on me in the long term

blah

e.t

blah

.c

blah

Life.

Is.

Life.

Like.

Chris,

Loved that David Foster Wallace quote.

Pollock as in the fish 'Pollock'... don't let that be confused with the painter Jackson Pollock (whose work I am still not convinced by) and by it being placed next to Warhol (which I believe is also the name given to a small microbe that lives on the undersides of Uzbek horses... I prefer the artist in this case).

This thread reminds me of that bit in The Commitments when a series of would-be band members are asked to name their influences. I feel a bit like the succession of girls who say "Joni Mitchell", followed by a rapidly slamming door...

Joni
Bjork
Thomas Tallis
June Tabor's voice
Bushwood (a place)
Yorkley Slade ( place, and equates not with a line from Socrates, but a bit from Chopin's first Nocturne).

I think there are other, mostly musical influences, but they're a bit transient, their effects... they're places where I suddenly understand something without having to put into words...poetry's where I can speak without having to explain... has anybody read Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens? That's really influencing me at the moment, and also articulates the biology of all this (which I can barely follow, having given science up a long time ago..)

Going back to the very start of this thread; is the worrying thing that when most poets are asked their influences they only name other poets, and not all the other things/people etc. that obviously influence us.

Also it seems that it is fine (even obligatory) for novelist to quote pop music, football ect as influences.

Derek, I agree. Todd Swift's been writing interestingly about this (pop culture / poetry) on his blog.

I suppose it's all to do with the context of the question. If you're being interviewed for a poetry mag, you maybe assume the readers/interviewer want/s poetic and/or literary influences...

Mark E Smith
Stella Artois
Manchester
and my friends

Non literary influences - and I'm going to avoid the whole film and music and art crowd - and go for non-people influences!

Computers - love the point and click and drag of life on line - just how much Microsoft Word influences my poetry - been spelling in americanise from 1994 to '98.

Architecture - I'm still trying to work on a piece that had foundations at the bottom and climbs to withering heights using serious bits of structure. Trouble with English is we read down the page, yet in real life build from the ground up.

Paper - when I write in my moleskin I write short poems. When I write on A4 foolscap I write longer poems. Once I wrote an epic on a roll of toilet paper. Tip: Don't use brown pencil.

Smell - I'm obsessed with writing about things I used to smell as a kid - my mothers cooking, gorse bushes, rotten carcasses, sticky buds on sycamore trees. Memory evokers, wet dogs, Sunday mass, the dark inside of the pub when you've been playing out on the swings.

I'm tempted to throw in Catholic Guilt, but it so much relies on people it would go against the rule I have for this post, so I'll leave it at that.

Dominic