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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
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 was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.
I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
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.
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 can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
No opposing quotes found.