My tendency to construct a pantheon of musical and artistic heroes, (with a few poets thrown in too of course). It's really a sense of creating a mythic construction of the self. I am the person influenced by these people, in the sense that they flow into me. Each is an alternate self or part of the self, but of the self conceived of as a kind of collector of artistic arrangers of the world. I'm not sure if it's especially commendable--or condemnable either. It's just the way I'm wired.

If someone does not appear on my list, it is not because of a lack of respect in any sense, but simply because they aren't personally engaging at that deep level. For example, Reverdy and not Apollinaire, though I'm sure Apollinaire is more important than Reverdy in the grand scheme of things.

Not surprisingly, there are more men than women on the list. The MLA guide to language gender and professional writing tells you to avoid catalogues or lists of great male figures, that rhetorical flourish of citing names like that. I'll never be able to avoid that gesture though. I guess the genius model is suspect. I had this argument with someone a few years back. Someone who didn't believe in geniuses. I won the argument by playing the Coltrane card.


Ashbery. Bach. Barthes. Baudelaire. Borges. Bracho. Brown (Clifford). Camarón. Ceravolo. Chambers. Charles. Coleman. Coltrane. Coolidge. Cornell. Creeley. Evans. Feldman. Gamoneda. García Lorca. Guest. Hawkins. Hodges. Holiday. Jones (Elvin). Koch. Lezama Lima. Miles. Monk. Montejo. O'Hara. Parker. Powell. Puente. Reverdy. Rodríguez. Rollins. Rothko. Roussel. Shapiro. Schuyler. Stevens. Tatum. Vallejo. Varela. Velasco. Williams (Tony + William Carlos). Wittgenstein. Young (Lester that is).

That's just a fraction of my admirations. Some I admire greatly but wouldn't put on the list because they simply do not belong to my intimate sphere.