Previous post follow up.

In my previous post, I asked people to identify their peers in their chosen art form. (If you haven’t answered that, I’d love it if you would do so…)

I think it’s interesting that the vast majority of people identified their peers as people they knew, from their local scenes. I might have set that off with my own listing.

I should say that I also think of my peers (as I define that) as people like Thomas Lux, Tony Hoagland, Thomas Transtromer, maybe Adrienne Rich — again, I’m not trying to say I write as well as they do, but that in the sense of the territory they work in and the care which they seemingly bring to that work, we’re on the same page.

Now, I want to know who your role models are. To what do you aspire? Not in the sense of “I want to write like (insert name here),” but in the sense of trying to achieve the same goals and level of art that those people reach.

For me, that’s a relatively easy question. I want to hit the same heights as Rilke, Shakespeare, Neruda, Dickinson, Whitman — the dealing with the universal questions of human life and spirituality that excite me beyond belief.

These questions, by the way, are an attempt to look at the scope of artistic vision; who do we admire, emulate, relate to?

I am, eventually, going somewhere with this.

TIA.