These two poets invigorated my love for spoken word. Both were starkly different in their style, both reading and writing. It was refreshing, to say the least.
Dillard's attention to sound and image struck a chord with me. When she said that she hears a voice I thought she was talking about a character, and she was in a way. But then she said that it repeats and reverberates and this is how I feel about my process with poetry. Sometimes I hear a few words or a line that's great and it will just reverberate, or to use her phrase she said after when I got my book signed: "Like a bell ringing." These voices could definitely be heard through her work. However, since the poems from The Lost Alphabet had an extended voice that she worked with for so long they felt stronger when she read them aloud. Like she was again putting on the mask of the lepidopterist. Very comforting, too, her voice--it did not grate with her poems.
Daniel's energy with his works was something I need to steal. My poetry does not move very fast (but it does so in a nice, turtle-esque manner). His work was fast-paced and charged with terrific imagery and sounds like "You dig and you wait in the dark heart of the Earth." He wove hugely different experiences into one delicious ball of verse. The braid of literature and musical culture was done splendidly and while I feel that I weave experience into my poems, Daniel's level is one to strive for--one of complete mixture.
I can steal a lot from these poets and will definitely be looking back at the lines and snippets I jotted down for future poems.
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