I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.
I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!
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.
Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.