![]() He goes on to observe that during his childhood in Washington DC, “the voice that was on television all the time was Richard Nixon, and so when I began my formal training in poetry, you know, they all sounded like Nixon to me.” Imagine this pastiche declaimed in a deep-pitched monotone, as Ellis jiggles nonexistent jowls. I was beat digging at the artist’s colony, it’s kind of funny, and I heard “let us go then you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky in a red wheelbarrow and that has made all the difference.” The cadence of that decade became my new haint, the new thing that haunted me, and so I wrote this - this is an homage to that sound. Before launching into the poem, he remarks: ![]() Thomas Sayers Ellis, or a version of him looping eternally on YouTube, is about to read “ All Their Stanzas Look Alike,” a weirdly hypnotic indictment of academic and aesthetic politics. His indirect influence has, of course, been immense, but I should be hard put to it to say exactly what it is. When reading a poet who found his own voice after 1922, I often come across a cadence or trick of diction which makes me say “Oh, he’s read Hardy, or Yeats, or Rilke,” but seldom, if ever, can I detect an immediate, direct influence from Eliot. ![]()
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