Note from Jess: I asked a few poets I know to share how fiction has informed or influenced their poetry.

Eleni Sikelianos
I have been as influenced by fiction as poetry. Moby Dick and A la recherche du temps perdu were hugely important to the poems in my book Earliest Worlds — lifted lines, twisted lines, mistranslated lines all made their way into the poems, and the first part of the book (“Blue Guide”) has prose poems as its vertebral structure, so to speak. Why? Moby Dick is nearly poetry — the energy of the language is astounding — and Proust’s painfully delicate, intimate tracking of the encounter between an interior and exterior life cuts deep into the psyche.

Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter [informed] The Book of Jon and a current project. Jean Genet. Virginia Woolf. Beckett. Steinbeck, when I was a kid, and more recently on The California Poem too — in particular his collaboration with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, Log from the Sea of Cortez (which was ground-breaking in that it combined Ricketts’ scientific field notes, though most current editions have cut them out). Laird Hunt, always — what he writes and what he reads, and what he reads of mine.

Arda Collins
I’ve learned a lot about style and tone from reading fiction, but specifically the Cheever story The Chimera. As you may know, he was a great admirer and reader of Nabokov, who obvs. also is a great stylist. “The Chimera” is not especially widely read, it’s from his collection World of Apples. I read it randomly in junior high school because I found the book somewhere and it stayed with me forever. I reread it a few years ago for the first time since I was 13 and recognized every sentence; it’s like it had been inside me all those years of writing. As it turns out, “The Chimera” is Cheever’s version of the Nabokov story “Spring in Fialta.” I taught them together for a fiction workshop one time, and we did close readings of certain passages, the way you would in a poetry workshop.

Eryn Green
I have a series of poems culled from Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and extended passages inspired by Thoreau’s Walking. I know neither are fiction, per se, but both work for me in the same way that fiction often does for my practice, in that both seed my conception of writing with new risks and promises, which enables me to write through a new headspace. Rousseau and Thoreau remind me that there is no there in the poem until you go there, that the act of composition is so intimately related to the act of locomotion, and that revery is the signal of work that is working Often in fiction, it’s a voice, or a cadence that I take with me when I leave—after reading Moby Dick for the first time, I swear I dreamt in deranged post-Shakespearean monologues. Lolita was a big book for me, too, when I was writing my first collection—something about the wildness and cool of the language, the general unhunged-ness of it all…models of velocity.

Elizabeth Cross
Bronte was influential—both intellectually and emotionally—maybe this has something to do with Wuthering Heights starting out as a poem before she “translated” it into a novel.

I found both how she used the language to be compelling as well as the content of what she was saying. The how: Wuthering Heights started out as an epic poem Emily was writing with her brother. They spent years on it together. Then she decided to turn it into a novel, but I think the intensity and rigor of the language comes from the poetry phase.

The content: There is so much connection between the outer natural world and the internal world of the characters. While this is typical of Romantic literature of the time, Bronte pushes it to an extreme state. As a result, she can create these kind of intermediary states that are between the real world and the deepest personal state of feeling to the point where haunting occurs—the real is imaginary and the imaginary real. This just makes a very large space in a very small book to explore all kinds of things from psychological states to relationships to the very nature of reality and how we perceive it.

Oh, and as a poet I just love how the formal issue of how the book seems to be a wild, disordered mess with no structure, when in fact it is rigorously, almost maniacally, structured in these multiple nesting boxes of narration and time.

Broc Rossell
Since I discovered Cesar Aira’s novellas (New Directions recently published a fourth) I’ve read them as a way to more deeply engage with my own poetic practice. I heard from a friend that Aira has not only never revised his work, but he has never read anything he has ever written. I don’t know if that’s true, and that’s certainly not the case with my poems, but it would go a little way toward explaining the unbelievable (as in non-believable) digressions he makes in his stories. Plots are never more than ostensible, and beginning a novella means one is certain to come across an lengthy philosophical treatise regarding the architecture of the unbuilt, for instance, or a description of lightning twice striking a horseman so vivid and transformative that preceding pages are rendered happily irrelevant. In a sense his digressions are more than digressions – they’re diversions that lead to new territory. I think digression is close to the heart of contemporary poetry; for almost every living poet I can think of, it is the frequency and style of digression that characterizes their work, and where one finds the mind behind the text. After reading Aira I began to experiment with what I think of as “the intensity of digression,” tightening the screws to digress every few words, or loosening the reins to write poems that pivoted on two or three explicit axes. In that sense I have Aira to thank for a better understanding not only of poetry but of my own work.