In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.
The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.
American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.
I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.
Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.
More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.
If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
I was raised by my grandparents, and they always made sure that I had a pencil and some paper, whether we were in the car or at a restaurant. While they were enjoying a nice meal, I would be sitting there drawing funny pictures of the waitress.
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