To me influence is just one of my greatest joys, as long as you avoid those pitfalls of just being imitative, as opposed to I’m glad when people read Enon for example. ((Imitate First)) And if they hear Emily Dickinson in Enon, it will make my day, because she was the patron saint of Enon, as long as she’s aunty Emily, she’s one of my great aunts artistically. ((Grand Exaggeration, Shoulders Of Giants, Start On Guitar)) Wallace Stevens has an entire chapter in Enon, that is just a kind of loose riff on his poem Large Red Man Reading. That’s not a secret, what I mean, like I’ll tell you that, because that will open — as long as what I’m not doing is just cribbing their lines, because I actually don’t have anything to say myself.

It’s more like I’m just placing my — I mean I’m not placing myself. It’s not deliberative, it’s just circumstantial. I just happen to find myself sharing that kind of cultural and aesthetic and philosophical and intellectual DNA with them, kind of. And so, I just see myself as continuing to meditate upon and put aesthetic pressure on the same questions that they devoted their life’s work and thinking to.