Tell us about a teacher or library that made a difference in your life and helped you become the student you are today.

What a question to pose someone who grew up shy! I lived in my public library (oh, Niles, Illinois), as I linger now on the fluorescent-lit floor of my professor's offices (where I write this). A small difference is in quality of coffee; the Niles Public Library touted a technological miracle to a caffeine-sheltered kid—the almost-instant latte vendor. Besides, on-campus affairs are blessed with real espresso. I feel a halo of energy while imagining my Professor-Nestor figure, ecstatically procrastinating my copy of Ulysses. This intertextual impulse (a habit, really), could never have gnawed my pulse so had I not, on whim (and a shining myriad of ratemyprofessor quips), registered for The Dionysian in Modern Thought. Freshman year, first semester, first class—Professor Damian Stocking. Such kalediscopic openness, a hint of unlethal Siren Song, in that class, that mentor. How could I have found Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture otherwise? I knew about Anne Carson; I had no clue what to do with her. I wanted to chase art history, snatch a crown of some museum curator. In New York, probably. I'm too-rooted in Los Angeles now, speaking of museums (and, well, coffee overpriced). 

Look at my laptop tabs: I count 6 alone for The Poetry Foundation (hello, Eliot! Siken, Pound, Ashbery…). I never thought I had a poet's guts; I picked the name Percy (long story) as somewhat of a joke, an enclitic form of my last Romantic name (Byron, though I'm not British-descended). Professor Stocking has better sight by far, a sharper diagnosis—as Athena to Telemachus, he stirred my soul to being-in-the-world. That precious contingency with others: Writing. Textual identification beyond any imagining—like cradling a living thing, sharing its steady whisper. An intensification of togetherness. And, too, he drew close the dreaded-beloved pantheon of philosophy (Bataille, I think, speaks best to me; and my Catholic guilt communes well with Kierkegaard). What a whimsical alter! What words! Not to clip the blooming wings of a praise-poem, but I will place my thoughts simply: never could I have dared to break the caesural pause of my past without Professor Stocking, and the Oxy CSLC department. I have heard my future in lectures and library-pages, and it resounds like homecoming.

Still a writer uncertain, I try to traipse a tightrope between academia and beauty (I like Blake's thought of exuberance); most of my recent projects have been for my CSLC classes, those clever chimeras awaiting taming, and as such are products of philosophy and poetry's meeting. The first paper which kindled my hope for a career in academia (currently I hope, pray, a publication house will embrace me) brought Ginsberg's Howl and Bataille's The Accursed Share together in delirious dialogue. I prefer that eclectic pattern, and have kept it up— Zizek and McCarthy, Catullus and Cixous, Nancy and...everyone. The vision of this scholarly strain would be a dizzying rhizomatic twisting, gleaming faintly Deleuzean, but I know I'm not that good. I hardly learned grammar in middle school, in high school (I've just discovered noun cases, thanks to Ancient Greek). I'm weaving a web with still-absent thread. Not everything I can do is new-born, however; I’m hopelessly indebted to anyone inkstained (or lyre-struck) before me. Yet! I try; “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." I want (I say to T.S Eliot's daunting shade) to make everything my business. For a start, an Occidental poetry club. (Next, the world?)