Anxiety of Influence or Influence Easing Anxiety?

Growing up in a working-class household, with parents who were cultured, self-educated, and who valued the arts, I discovered poetry, which became a path toward self-knowledge. Early on, my ear became trained to the musical cadences and sense of deep meaning found in poetry. My father wrote and recited poetry, particularly Shakespeare’s monologues and sonnets. He also sang, primarily folk music, reinforcing the sense that sound conveys emotion and meaning. I early recognized that aspects of myself, particularly “negative” emotions, that I thought were unacceptable, were recognized and even valued by writers, who gave shape and expression to the full range of human experience.

Although it was clear to me that poets addressed a vast range of emotions, I believed that some emotions were “better” than others. Love, grief, sorrow, joy, and happiness were “noble” emotions that “good” people were allowed to feel. Hatred, jealousy, envy, resentment, and anger were “base” emotions that only “bad” people felt—”good” people weren’t allowed to feel those emotions. Fear was “neutral,” in that it felt unpleasant, but I didn’t experience fear as a reflection on my moral character.

Yet it was exhilarating to discover the full range of emotion reflected in poetry, whether dramatic poetry, narrative poetry, lyric poetry, imagistic poetry, formal verse, or free verse. Writing poetry in the voice of an “I” that was other than myself felt liberating. I didn’t yet realize that all voices in anything I wrote, whether poetry, fiction, or plays, were aspects of myself; that every “I” was indeed my own “I,” though disguised in a different persona.

In adulthood, I began psychoanalysis three times a week, which led me to decide to train as a psychoanalyst and facilitated the integration of the split-off parts of the self that I was expressing in poetry, fiction, and plays that I wrote but was still experiencing as alien, other, and forbidden.

When I write poetry, I am aware of the various traditions in

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poetry that influence my work. Harold Bloom’s major opus, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), offers a theory of poetry, drawing on “intra-poetic influences” representing an anxiety of influence, in which strong poets “misread” each other in order to establish their own voice. Weaker poets, he claims, idealize established poets. I think of myself as a “strong” poet, perhaps because I am, perhaps because I need to think I am, perhaps both. I don’t think I idealize the “strong” poets I admire. Rather, I think I have found guides, kindred spirits, and playmates. Nor do I need to triumph over them to establish my strength. I need to find companionship.

Bloom also states that poets’ rebel against consciousness of death. I could conceptualize, following Bloom, that creativity in general may represent a rebellion against consciousness of death. Yet I see a generative urge in creativity, a great act of affirmation of existence, a Yes! to the creation of the universe, that indeed the Creator should have created the universe, and that one’s progenitors, one’s parents, should have created one. Thus, the “Poetic I” creates to join with all eternity and infinity in the creative impulse that caused the universe to exist and to affirm my own right to existence.

Recently I felt a great desire to answer Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence with a poem, to acknowledge my poetic progenitors, the poets who shaped my poetic awareness, who influenced my poetic voice. Thus I also desired to acknowledge my genetic/ environmental progenitors, my parents, who shaped my values, whose values I internalized, some of which caused inhibition that I had to address in my personal analysis, and who gave me access to the freedom I find in poetry. So I wrote a 10-part poem, “A Theory of Influence,” based on the terminology Bloom used to define the anxiety of influence. I’d like to end with a brief excerpt from what is a very long and complex poem, to convey the flavor of the process of valuing the gift of self-expression through poetry and my gratitude to the poets who have contributed so much to those who seek their reflection in the creative efforts of others. I offer Part II, Receiving the Gift, and Part III, Sharing the Gift.

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RECEIVING THE GIFT

In order to understand the language of the birds we lick honey off the page,
discover Aleph,
then Beit, in the beginning, a world within a Book
was the Word,
within the Book a Garden, and the Word was with….
and the Word was….

Within the Garden a fountain,
where water flowed like music,
where music flowed like words,
where words flowed language, the language of the birds,
wild with poetry.

SHARING THE GIFT
Whoever is listening,
co-create.
Word-music lives in I-Thou. Guide for the Perplexed:
Be here now – and how –

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