At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.
I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.
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.
I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.
At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.