Word After Word

I know I want to teach  my students the art of browsing but I haven’t figured out how. I want to make them be happy. I’m like a desperate mother.

The browsing assignment J and I devised isn’t going to work. We road tested it and it failed. It produced standing, not browsing, and it wasted time instead of connecting students with the pleasure of panning for gold. But it seems more important than ever that I learn how to teach this skill.

I read my poetry to a class last week and spoke to the students about why anyone would write poetry and one of the questions was, “Who were your influences?” Without thinking, I said: “Ogden Nash, Richard Brautigan, James Tate, and Emily Dickinson.”

Answering, in a flash I saw myself as a kid, reading Ogden Nash, browsed from my parents’ shelves, and Richard Brautigan—how that book got into my uncle’s study in Possum Trot, I will never know. (Perhaps my cousin’s boyfriend, the one who built a teepee in their backyard and stayed for a year, the one who got her Gypsie Rose, the raccoon she walked on a leash.). Those books fell into my lap. Literally. As did my next great influence, James Tate. I found him browsing the stacks of the library at

The students wrote down those names. And I realized: I’ve given the wrong answer.

These books found me. They weren’t my influences so much as this was: knowing how to be found by what books I needed at any given time. That process, not those people. That’s what influences a writer. 

This is what I want to go back and tell that class: Don’t write down those names. You need your books. You have to get found by your own influences. Mine won’t work for you. You have to read haphazardly and widely and in libraries and used bookstores (shiny bookstores rarely have the depth and weirdness required for real browsing—the waves just don’t break). You have to use your whole body, like an instrument, and slowly troll through the shelves. It’s harder to do this kind of surfing on a computer. It’s exactly like looking for shark’s teeth on the beach; it’s the very best kind of shopping in the world. You’re looking for a “click,” a connection. You can’t know exactly what it’s going to be until you open a page, and at random, reading the lines—boom, a part of the world comes into focus that you’ve always known about, but have never really seen, really known. 

I loved those four authors, and they shaped my work. The arrogant sweetness and plain language and philoso-cheese in Brautigan inspired me and I wrote hundreds of bad Brautigan poems. From Tate, I took oblique-clear, humor-devastation, physical shapes-lunar endings. He showed me how to go to the place where you write poems from. Just simply how to get to that place. From Nash, play!!! Language as something plastic as silly putty.

But they aren’t really my influences. Influences change constantly. Influences are whatever you in love with that day. Browsing is the way a writer works under the influence. It’s a full body collision with books; fingertips are not enough.  Anything you find yourself is better than something assigned to you.

How am I going to teach browsing?  It’s going to be like teaching  empathy or celadon.

And I want it to be like tying your shoes. Something you do every day.