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I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.

I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

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.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.