The coincidence of ending my list of favorite writers with Dr. Williams M.D., is appropriate. All but eight of the writers I cite are American, and one of his goals was the establishment of an authentic American voice. Or, as it turns out, voices. And the majority of the writers are from the second half of the 20^th century or later.

Williams was an influence on many of them, and he was generous in his encouragement, even if he had met them just once.

I first encountered him as an assignment for a contemporary poetry I was taking at the beginning of my junior year of college. I opened my textbook on a rainy Saturday morning while visiting a friend at another college in Indiana and was soon entranced. The reliance on imagery was unlike anything I’d previously read. Returning to them is always refreshing and unexpectedly surprisingly.

I have a fondness, too, for his short prose, often drafted on a hidden typewriter between patients back in an earlier era of medical care. I’m not sure I’d call them short stories, not in the sense of being deeply crafted like those of Dubus or Lee I’ve mentioned or of being abstracted from real individuals, but they are direct flashes of humanity.

What makes him stand apart from the other big figures of the emerging American poetry – Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Edward Arlington Robinson, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, among them? His form, for one thing, openly reflected American voice patterns, as did his subject matter, arising from everyday circumstances of the common people, for another. I appreciate Kenneth Burke’s insight that poetry was, for Williams, “equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life.” I’ll extend that to the fiction I love, too.

Looking at his upbringing, filled with Spanish and some elite schooling, I more fully appreciate the fact that he is the one who worked to free us to listen to our own voices rather than some nasal, high-pitched affection for our culture.

Maybe I was intrigued by the title of the 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” but when I finally got around to reading her, in the novel The Waves, it was epiphany. While I had heard of stream-of-thought writing, but what overwhelmed me was the utter beauty of the prose and its observations. What poured forth was a stream, period.

I do get caught up in style more than content. Perhaps that reflects much of my career as a copy editor having to clean up a news story on a tight deadline.

Still, returning to her is always refreshing.

Not to be confused with the Depression-era novelist Thomas Wolfe, the journalist Tom came to prominence in the final years of the New York Herald Tribune, my favorite newspaper ever.

With its clean, classic design, smart writing and editing, and sometimes playfully tabloid headlines, it was a standout in a very competitive newspaper market but looking for one more edge to assure its survival.

Voila, Wolfe emerged with his hyper, supercharged, Pop art zeitgeist, in-your-face, “Look at this!” writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine (which would continue on its own as New York magazine after the newspaper itself ceased publication). He even moved up to the daily paper itself as a columnist, alongside Jimmy Breslin.

Quite simply, he was fun to read.

Maybe it was a reflection of his Manhattan success or the counterculture themes he picked up on, but Wolfe created a marketable visual image as a dandy in a white, often three-piece, suit, with oversized glasses. He was about getting attention for himself, counter to the usual advice to reporters to make themselves invisible so they could more objectively view the events unfolding before them.

Not so, Tom. Or, in my case, with the college prof who thought I’d be the next Tom Wolfe.

His Electric-Acid Kool-Aid Test, following Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as avatars of LSD, became a bestselling sensation leading memorably to the Right Stuff about astronauts.

Apart from this writing style, he knew how to sniff out a trend. In contrast, I ultimately went counter-trend.

I do wonder how much he influenced me. Perhaps in Subway Visions.

As for others, Hunter Thompson seems to have most closely built on the legacy.

By the way, the novelist Wolfe was notorious for excess writing, too, though of a masterly sort.

As for the Herald Trib, you can get a taste of it in my post “Establishing my creds” of September 11, 2014.

Encountering Johnson during my freshman year of college was like mastering a foreign language. His baroque English, with its convoluted sentences and lofty vocabulary backed by an oversized ego, were so foreign to the flat Midwestern voice I’ve inherited or the accompanying weight of humility and piety.

I did wind up publishing an underground broadside series, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, in the aftermath, though it had a kind of Wind in the Willows countercurrent. Anyone remember mimeograph?

Later, at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, I actually had in my hands on original copies of The Rambler that Johnson produced twice a week beginning in 1750. Some of the issues before me had coffee stains. Or were they tea? There were also pencil markings in the margins.

His influence probably resulted in the complex compound sentences in my own work that likely limit my readership. Thanks, Literary Lion.

I should have also seen the way he created a role of outrageous author and played it to the hilt, far before the excesses of Romanticism swept European culture. Richard Wagner could have taken lessons from Johnson.

Another of the novelists to enter my elite circle of influences recently, Banks addressed the working-class lives of northern New England and upstate New York. He included also darkness, despair, and grit that feel real, rather than at a bit of distance. There’s a heft I found missing from some others, like Carolyn Chute’s Beans of Egypt, Maine or Ernest Hebert’s Darby Chronicles of New Hampshire, not that they aren’t informative.

The Sweet Hereafter is my favorite so far in that vein, though I should also mention The Darling, which shifts the action to Liberia and the focus to failed political activism.

With 21 volumes of fiction to his name, my TBR pile gets deeper.

He also has me recalling Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, which I had thought was his.

My poetry efforts bloomed burgeoned in two periods. The first was in the decade after I left the ashram, culminating in my four years in the Pacific Northwest. The second was in my first two decades in New England.

Bly came center stage for me in that second round as I began working increasing in Deep Image directions, without yet having heard the term.

Bly, as it turned out, was a major proponent of the concept. I did find his essays very helpful, especially the idea of riding a dragon or even the dragon smoke, along with the ways we humans think with three brains and his criticism of most English poetry as being miniature sermons.

His own work and much of what he translated is infused with a darkness I hadn’t found in the Beat-based poetry of the San Francisco renaissance, including the Northwest.

The majority of the writers I’ve most admired possessed a strong sense of place, and Bly was no exception. His return to rural Minnesota after Harvard and Norway is a prime example.

While he’s also lauded as a founder of the men’s movement, I had been working in other fronts of the issue and found Iron John rather forced as an argument. Gary Snyder’s earlier Dimensions of a Haida Myth impressed the importance of folktales on me much more.

Reading that his examinations of male identity sprang from the emotional crisis he encountered after being divorced by his first wife, Carol, leads to the questions of how much she shaped his earlier work and quite possibly what followed. Her short stories are memorable. When she died in 2007, she was hailed as Minnesota’s lioness of letters.

A public reading he gave with his close friend Donald Hall in Concord, New Hampshire, remains memorable. Throughout their careers, they mailed new work to each other for critique before showing it elsewhere. Their styles were so different. The reading itself came shortly after the death of Hall’s wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and was in her honor.