My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, 'Give and Take,' was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
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.
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.