Writer Maud Newton has. She confesses:

A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocative, meticulously pared-down This Party’s Got to Stop.

About a third of the way through, I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn.

You're not alone, Maud. It happens to me all the time. For me it comes from looking at the work of photographers I greatly admire. For instance:

Robert Maxwell  ↓

Chris Buck  ↓

Jake Chessum  ↓

Danny Clinch  ↓

So what do you do when you suffer, as even Joan Didion too suffered, from "awe-inspired paralysis"?

Maud has her own trick.

For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.

That's a good one if you're a writer.

As a photographer, I just take what inspires me about the work or style -- the pose, light, composition, film grain, whatever -- and file it away in my head. I may even go so far as to create an image or more in a favorite photographer's style just to get it out of my system.

The upshot here is that in the process I've (hopefully) learned something new about my craft by doing and not just looking. Even if I am only filing away the image for future reference the influence of my heroes is part of my work. Sometimes you see it in a final image, sometimes you don't.

I find great joy in the work of my favorite photographers (as Maud does in her favorite writers). It's almost as if each and every one of them is right there with me each and every time I make a photograph. Yeah, it's intimidating, but we make a damn good team.

Miguel Piñero was a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, actor, ex-con, ex-addict, and co-founder of the Nuyorican poetry movement.

Piñero's most well-known poem -- A Lower East Side Poem -- is an elegy to the gritty and depraved Lower East Side of Manhattan in the '70s and '80s. The first stanza:

Just once before I die
I want to climb up on a tenement sky
to dream my lungs out till I cry
then scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

And the last stanza:

I don't wanna be buried in Puerto Rico
I don't wanna rest in long island cemetery
I wanna be near the stabbing shooting
gambling fighting & unnatural dying & new birth crying
so please when I die
don't take me far away
keep me near by
take my ashes and scatter them thru out
the Lower East Side.

That's just what his friend and fellow Nuyorican poetry movement co-founder Miguel Albarín did when Piñero died in 1988. Here is the story of that procession.

Another of Piñero's great poems is Seekin' The Cause.

he never gave his love to children
he never gave his heart to old people
& never did he ever give his soul to his people
he never gave his soul to his people
because he was busy seekin' a cause
busy
busy perfectin' his voice to harmonize the national anthem with spiro t agnew
busy perfectin' his jive talk so that his flunkiness wouldn't show
busy perfectin' his viva-la-policia speech
downtown, uptown, midtown, crosstown
his body was found all over town
seekin' a cause
seekin' the cause

Check out Piñero himself reading part of Seekin' The Cause in this video.

It's pretty powerful stuff.

Oh, to move like Trisha Brown.

Here's what I came up with.

I love these images.

Thanks for the inspiration, Jami.

His photographs have had a huge influence on my own work and continue to inspire and push me to this day.

He will be missed.