I actually remember celebrating National Poetry Day at school; I remember having to write and read a load.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.
Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
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.
Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.
I read poetry to save time.
In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.