As a Mexican born in the mid-seventies, at the beginning I was greatly influenced mainly by the Beat Generation, but equally influential to me were the French Modernists and Beckett and Joyce. And Pessoa and Ungaretti. And Alejandra Pizarnik and Cristina Peri-Rossi. And Villaurrutia and Lopez Velarde. And Charles Olson and Charles Bernstein. And William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman. And Paul Celan. And... So it's all a great mix-up. I did not become a more organized reader of poetry until I seriously considered writing poetry as a way of life.

It wasn't until I started blogging that I started reading more late 20th and 21st century poetry and was able to be in touch with some of my contemporaries of other countries. Definitely, blogging and the Internet in general could be a definitive transformative mechanism in the way poets in America (the whole continent) and the rest of the world relate, dialogue and influence each other. (Ernesto Priego)

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