Encountering a trio of his Sonnets in an issue of the Paris Review my senior year of college blew me away. First, by the fact that their iambic pentameter had been cut into lacy fragments but also that the remaining threads were made more powerful and light-filled as a result. Or, “oh, for the loving” (expletive), as he wrote. These were more like the collages of Robert Rauschenberg than the corseted stanzas of Shakespeare.
The fuller set, published in 1964, advanced the impact, especially in seeing how the collection came together as a series of essentially three poems that kept getting reassembled in new ways. Variations on a theme, as it were.
These were unmistakably urban, cigarette smoky, and not so secretly drug-infused.
They inspired my own set of American sonnets, The Braided Double-Cross.
As a reader, they also point me toward John Berryman and John Ashbery.
I love his definition of a poem as a miniature wind-up toy.
Jnana's Red Barn 