When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with 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 took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.
I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.
I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.
What I wrote all the time when I was a kid - I don't want to call it 'poetry,' because it wasn't poetry. I was not that kind of a writer. I was a rhymer. I was a fan of Dorothy Parker's, so maybe I wrote poetry to that extent, but my main focus was the humor of it, and word construction, and the slant. Your words, it's a very powerful experience.
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 was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.
I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.