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My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

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.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

I used to see my dad and his brothers rhyming, and I knew I wanted to do that one day. I'm like any other boy, always wanting to follow in his father's footsteps.

My father was a professional artist all his life who encouraged my path as an artist.

I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.

My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.