Your Influences?

well i've started looking at other contemporary poets and so far i like brian patten, martin blyth, simon harrison (don't know where his web site went) and john hegley (for amusement factor). women poets? besides w c and c a duffy. advise me please..

Judging on the style of the bloke poets you like, for women try Ruth Padel, Liz Lochead, Jo Shapcott.....

thankyou. will look them up.

found one poem by ruth padel and two by jo shapcott..

Brian Patten Carol Ann Duffy Ivoryfishbone.

guiness mcewans 80/- ale mexican black tar heroin

Cormac McCarthy John Steinbeck Charles Bukowski Colin McClinnes Ben Richards Bruce Robinson It is endless.

Iris Murdoch Fay Weldon Oscar Wilde Saki Zola etc etc etc

didn't zola used to play for italy? and who is saki

Tom Robbins Kurt Vonnegut Charles Dickens Jane Austen William Shakespeare Bob Dylan and I really really wish I could play guitar like Frank Zappa. pip pip tc

Nicola Barker (top choice, she's mind-blowin'!) Jeanette Winterson Kurt Vonnegut Iain Banks

Dear Beef, We were both filing at the same instant and I had just had a discussion with myself as to whether to put in Iain Banks in my list. Had decided not to do so because of his Iain M. Banks stuff which I do not like. So who do you want to play guitar like? It really annoys me when people hi-jack threads and take them off in different directions. Ho Hum So It Goes. (Name that author)

Saki, master of cutting social satire satire...macabre, acid, very funny. Drives a knife into the upper crust of English Edwardian life. The effete and dashing Reginald, Clovis and Comus Bassington, tea on the lawn with articulate duchesses, the smell of gunshot and the tinkle of the caviar fork. The half-seen, half-felt menace of disturbing undercurrents...

Difficult one - influences rather than writers you admire... plenty of writers I admire, but they are usually way off the stuff I like to write. Ideally, my stuff would be equal parts G K Chesterton, Raymond Chandler and P G Wodehouse. I admire the hell out of Ray Carver, but I'd never attempt to write like that. The writer closest to what I'd want my work to be (when you start a story and it is just a glistening perfect idea of how it will pan out) is Haruki Murakami. It is interesting how many poets here on the site tell me that they have tried things out they'd never have dared because they've seen Liana try. I'd love to be able to write in as inspiring a way as Jozef, but he got that inspiration the hard way, and I'm not sure I'd swop my comfortable safe life story for his.

Sorry, repeated meself again (satire) - still, it was probably worth it...

pam ayres spike milligan wilbur smith h e bates john irving mary oliver ann tyler t s eliot toni morisson a l kennedy rose tremain penelope fitzgerald e annie proulx ian mcmillan carol ann duffy selima hill these are some of my influences ... i dont mean i would like to write like them all ...

....everything you read is going to influence you...if you hate it, you determine not to write like it...but there are people I love to read and hopefully influence me.. Christopher Fowler, Ian Rankin, Alan Furst, Ben Richards, Val McDermid,Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, George Pelecanos, John King,Richard Russo,Richard Ford,Jay Mcinerney, James Ellroy...... too many male writers I know........

simon66 - i think he's marvellous

thanks for the clear up andrea, but could have done without the florid explanation! :O) i want to play guitar like kevin shields from my bloody valentine. i cant strum as fast as that for longer than about 10 seconds and he manages it for whole songs. slight case of tennis elbow.

vodka anonymous trapeze circus sex humiliation we can go ahead and say "in that order" oh, and the very very stupid- they are a huge influence...

Blimy Thanks Fish for reminding me. E Annie Proulx. Of course. And Martin T. Thank christ someone else has read Ben Richards. I thought I was alone. Is it an East End thing? ralph

pleasure i'm sure ...

RogerMcGoughBrianPattenAdrianHenriMiroslavHolubCzeslawMiloszPamAyersPaulDurcanLesMurrayGigRyanWendyCopeCarolAnnDuffySimonArmitageJohnCooperClarkSharonOldsFrankO'HaraAnnStevensonSophieHannahAdrianMitchellPabloNerudaStevieSmithAnon(influences/not/necessarily/favourites/though/some/are)

Ooops! Sorry, didn't mean to do that!! Was it lack of word spaces? Won't do it again, Miss Emily, honest!

...Ralph, Ben Richards does write well about Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and I live in Hackney and have worked in the East End as well. he used to work as a Housing Officer and so did I, the similarities end there, he's brought out 4 well received novels....and I........haven't.....yet eye thank ewe

i’d like to be influenced by harold pinter, alan bennett, roger mcgough and bob dylan, but stuff comes out as if it’s influenced by harold steptoe, alan partridge, roger rabbit and bob the builder

In response to your earlier post TC, in reality I would love to play the guitar lke anyone who play the guitar, since my acoustic still sits, unloved and unplayed, in the corner cos I'm too lazy to learn (*runs from sound of 'boo! hiss!'*). Ideally though, Mark Flanagan or indeed, your choice of Zappa.

In response to your earlier post TC, in reality I would love to play the guitar like anyone who plays the guitar, since my acoustic still sits, unloved and unplayed, in the corner cos I'm too lazy to learn (*runs from sound of 'boo! hiss!'*). Ideally though, Mark Flanagan or indeed, your choice of Zappa.

playing guitar like Johnny Marr. writing like Philip Larkin / Martin Amis / Evelyn Waugh.

i want to play the guitar like jean claude van damme write like jon bon jovi and fight like kingsley amis, maybe ted hughes as well

Raymond Carver Albert Camus Graham Greene Philip Larkin TS Eliot William Blake Joseph Conrad Doris Lessing Rainier Maria Rilke D.H Lawrence Homer JD Salinger Sylvia Plath JRR Tolkien Langston Hughes WH Auden Terry Pratchett Emily Dickinson Kenneth Grahame Antoine de Saint-Exupery William Shakespeare Edgar Allen Poe Roland Barthes John Barth Walt Whitman Wilfred Owen Siegfried Sasson Edward Thomas Virginia Woolf Derek Walcott James Joyce Anton Chekov Leo Tolstoy Joseph Heller Ernnest Hemingway Donald Barthelme Douglas Adams Seamus Heaney Ted Hughes Simon Armitage John Burnside Edward Said Toni Morrison - Influences: bad and good, weak and strong.

taj! ... rilke of course ...

Does this thread have huge wide boxes on anyone elses screen?

not normally an expert on huge wide boxes, but yes

..it means you can stretch out.............................................. .......................................................................oohhhhhhhh that's better...... cracks knuckles and disappears ...........................................

mea culpa it was my posting what did it, m'lud. *cue Scouser in a suit joke*