I read “Self-Reliance” when I was 17 as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the ‘50s. In this short essay, Emerson takes a stance against conformity and insists on trusting your own judgement, on finding your own path, on living in the present and augmenting what is unique to your own character. These are the principles that have shaped my life and work.

What I find interesting in Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” is the distinction he makes between studium — what anyone recognizes at first glance as the general content of a photograph — and punctum, a very personal emotion or desire evoked by a detail in that same photograph. It is a switch from the objectification of the reproduction on a piece of paper to a purely subjective connection.

This small publication of Calvino’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard in 1985 is divided into five topics: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. Each essay is insightful and poetic, lyrical, a joy to read and re-read, an enduring primer for me.

“Grief and Reason” is the book I most often return to. It contemplates death as it has been presented in prose and poetry over the ages. The book continually asks the question of whether loss creates a sense of self or destroys it. It also poses the question of whether loss or mourning can bring forth a new artistic language.

From the first lines of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/ we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink it Celan’s poems are terrifying and beautiful, many of them reflect his experience of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp, he was imprisoned in a labor camp. Language is Celan’s tool of combat and survival, and of the evocation of memory. I have always preferred poetry and prose to fiction. Poetry condenses.

My admiration for Pessoa goes beyond reading his prose. I am in awe of his invention of the heteronym which allows him to be a multitude of authors. Pessoa creates different authors with different languages, voices, putting forth different, often contradictory representations of the world. His strategy is not to be confused with appropriation. All voices/authors are original and distinct. The lesson I took from Pessoa is that I must constantly distance myself from the activity of making so that I can observe my work from a vantage point other than my own.

I am not a Buddhist, but I have learned a great deal from Suzuki’s concept of “beginner’s mind.” In meditation you sit and concentrate on your posture and breathing. The purpose of meditation is to empty your mind and ready your awareness for anything and everything that will flow so that you can always be a beginner.

Deleuze interrogates language revealing all its inescapable paradoxes, distinctions, irresolutions and contradictions. The book begins with Louis Carol’s “Alice in Wonderland” and her confusion with language, and immediately moves into the Stoic’s definition of the effect of words and events, including sense and nonsense. All words, all logical representations are challenged. This book is a mind bender and a must-read.

Kubler considers all manmade objects as products of human needs. Everything, from tools to objects of aesthetic value (artwork) is analyzed based on the understanding that innovation is always prompted by a problem that needs to be solved. Kubler introduces the concept of the “prime object,” which can exist in physical form or as an idea. He posits that everything is based on a prime object and all that develops from that prime object are mere replications and reproductions. This book has shaped my determination to innovate and to avoid the mannerisms of appropriation.

A young poet who is up against old masters must clear an imaginative space for himself through a creative misunderstanding or misreading of the poets of the past. Bloom defines six categories of overcoming the influence of precursors. He calls these categories “Revisionary Ratios.” They are useful to all artists.