Clarence Major was a Finalist
for the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Configurations.
The book that influenced me the earliest was A Season
in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud. I read it when I was
eighteen and it changed my life-changed my way of seeing
the world, opened up new possibilities of perception,
changed the way I saw words and the arrangement of words.
Other books that left an early and great impression
on me were Raymond Radiguet's, those of Faulkner, Hemingway
and Mark Twain.
