I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
There was something so immensely redemptive and exciting for me to imagine that my unknown father was not just a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice.
I wanted my dad to be proud of me, and I fell into acting because there wasn't anything else I could do, and in it I found a discipline that I wanted to keep coming back to, that I love and I learn about every day.
Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
I felt that the best I could do for my father, and the best I could do for myself, and my mother and my family was to stay open to the experience, and learn whatever I could at every step of the way as it was going on.
At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.
All I wanted to do was come into my own and find out my career path and what I wanted to do with my life - but, at the same time, showing respect to my father and mother and make them proud as well.
When it comes to Father's Day, I will remember my dad for both being there to nurture me and also for the times he gave me on my own to cultivate my own interests and to nurture my own spirit.
I worked hard and made my own way, just as my father had. And just, I'm sure, as he hoped I would. I learned, from observing him, the satisfaction that comes from striving and seeing a dream fulfilled.
I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.
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