As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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 am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.
Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.