According to the OED, it derives from a term that means "to flow in," most literally as water but also as in the action of the stars--an astrological sense. So, when we speak of influences," we're talking about things that have flowed into us. Anyone who's ever seen where streams or rivers come together knows how difficult it can be to trace the workings of the separate currents as they become confused--brought together. Influence can be confusing. Chemists could move downstream from where the waters mingled and analyze particulates from one tributary as opposed to another, but such analysis is difficult in terms of human life, whether we're speaking artistically or personally.
Setting aside the stars as nothing but magical thinking, influence involves something acting on us, whether physically or emotionally or psychologically. How to trace it?
When I was fourteen or fifteen, for reasons I can't remember I became interested in poetry. I bought one of the usual paperback anthologies of modern American poetry and read through, probably not understanding a lot of what I read. The first volumes of poetry by individual authors that I bought were Ezra Pound's Selected Poems and Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat and a Season in Hell. (Both were New Directions books for whatever that's worth.) I'm not sure what I made of the Rimbaud, or even most of the Pound, but a couple of the poems by Pound really struck me. Content? Verbal music? I'll probably never know. But these poems do stand at the doorway of my love for poetry.
Thinking about Pound, I remembered seeing his grave when I visited Venice and wrote this:
At the Grave of Ezra Pound
It’s nothing special. A granite marker
set in the manicured grass, a few
flowers. The waterbus was crowded—
tourists, mostly, though few spoke
English. February wind blew
the chilly spume like spikes, a chill
that lasted under lowering skies
like the dark swirls in the glass
blown on Murano. I’d like to say
that thoughts of the great Modernist
revolution pummeled across my mind.
I’d like to say that the complex
torment of politics and art replayed
itself while I knelt to contemplate
the weathered letters, “EZRA POVND,”
but how long can you look at a chunk
of stone embedded in the earth?
Setting aside the stars as nothing but magical thinking, influence involves something acting on us, whether physically or emotionally or psychologically. How to trace it?
When I was fourteen or fifteen, for reasons I can't remember I became interested in poetry. I bought one of the usual paperback anthologies of modern American poetry and read through, probably not understanding a lot of what I read. The first volumes of poetry by individual authors that I bought were Ezra Pound's Selected Poems and Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat and a Season in Hell. (Both were New Directions books for whatever that's worth.) I'm not sure what I made of the Rimbaud, or even most of the Pound, but a couple of the poems by Pound really struck me. Content? Verbal music? I'll probably never know. But these poems do stand at the doorway of my love for poetry.
Thinking about Pound, I remembered seeing his grave when I visited Venice and wrote this:
At the Grave of Ezra Pound
It’s nothing special. A granite marker
set in the manicured grass, a few
flowers. The waterbus was crowded—
tourists, mostly, though few spoke
English. February wind blew
the chilly spume like spikes, a chill
that lasted under lowering skies
like the dark swirls in the glass
blown on Murano. I’d like to say
that thoughts of the great Modernist
revolution pummeled across my mind.
I’d like to say that the complex
torment of politics and art replayed
itself while I knelt to contemplate
the weathered letters, “EZRA POVND,”
but how long can you look at a chunk
of stone embedded in the earth?
For what it's worth, I started trying to read Ulysses before I began to read Hemingway and was hot for Hemingway before I started reading the Beats--in high school. Were these all influences? They certainly caught me in their currents at a fairly early age.
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