When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.
From Jack Prelutsky
Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.
We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.
Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.
Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don't smell, but I remember my brother's did when we were kids.
My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.
I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.
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