Jim Moore on how reading Kenneth Rexroth changed his life

Invisible Strings
by Jim Moore
(Graywolf Press, 2011)

Jim Moore, whose seventh book of poems, Invisible Strings, was recently published, joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry. He writes on how discovering the right poet at a critical time can be a life-changing experience.

People sometimes ask, especially parents of aspiring writers, “What does it take to become a poet?” From my own experience I would say four things matter most:

1)	A broken heart.
2)	A sudden dislocation which results in you living in a new place, not really knowing why you are there.
3)	A welcoming bookstore floor.
4)	The luck of stumbling across a poet whose work seems written as if just for you; whose poems feel as if they are saving your life, stanza by blessed stanza.

Everything else takes care of itself.

A broken heart at nineteen is not hard to come by. But if you need a suggestion on how to go about it, try falling in love with your roommate's girlfriend. It's a surefire method. Then in desperation—it is winter, it is Minnesota, you are majoring in philosophy at Carleton College and the philosophers have no useful answers—you flee to Norman, Oklahoma. An old friend takes you in, you get a job selling hot pies door-to-door at the university's fraternities and sororities (should you need a refresher course in the permeable boundary between humility and humiliation this is particularly recommended), and—most important of all—you go to a bookstore with an upstairs attic-like room. For some reason you stumble into the poetry section, sit on the floor (this is a store where you are welcome to stay as long as you want if it is books you care about: it is not a coffee shop, a music store, a place to buy anything but books).