How did you come to poetry?

[MarcA]

The recent discussions about Billy Collins' worth as a poet and whether he deserves to be the US poet laureate or not got me to thinking about how useful that position could be in terms of actually getting more people interested in poetry. How many people are going to read those New York Times ads and actually become more interested in poetry? Since I can't poll the whole US, my question is to people here - how did you become interested in poetry?

[MarcA]

For the record, it was reading Yeats in 10th-grade English that turned me on to poetry. I started writing at about the same time.

[Harry Rutherford]

Well, I was always bookish anyway, and the English Department at my school was rather traditionalist (making us all read Keats and Milton and Donne for GCSE and A-level, rather than a lot of C20th novels), which helped, and it generally seemed like a natural thing to read poetry. And because I read it and enjoyed it, it also seemed a natural thing to try and write it.

Harry

[Rob Mackenzie]

When I was 12, a schoolteacher urged my class to write a poem. I wrote one about a mouse that terrorised a cat. It was called “The Cat And Mouse Ballad”. I still have it. I stopped writing poetry after my next poem, called “The Murderer”, about this guy who went around killing children one after another in increasingly horrible ways. Tactfully, I submitted this to my local church newsletter. The editor phoned my parents in a state of shock. I was then put through an interrogation to find out if there was anything wrong with me. I’d only been watching the news.

I used to go with my dad to Burns Suppers (at that time I lived in Scotland) and learned “To A Louse” off by heart to recite on such occasions. I still enjoy Burns even today.

When I was 17, I read Hughes, Larkin, and Hopkins at school. I liked them, and tried writing sonnets in a curious 19th century style about my teenage hang-ups. I stopped after about 3.

When I was 24, I discovered Wallace Stevens, thanks to a quote in a philosophy book. This somehow led me to Sylvia Plath and more attempts to write poetry in a style completely out of my depth. However, I still love Stevens’ poetry.

I was living in Edinburgh when I turned 27, and used to go to performance poetry shows. There was a guy Barry Graham who used to read – his best line was about when he was a child. His parents never used to bother with him, and after some time wearing the same clothes his “underpants would crackle like a packet of crisps”. I found inspiration from this and started writing performance poetry. Trouble was, I could never find anyone who wanted to hear it.

Eventually, my marriage broke up, and for something to do, I bought a Bloodaxe anthology called “Poetry With An Edge”, full of great stuff. I devoured books by Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov, Charles Simic, Simon Armitage, and various Scottish poets such as Hugh Macdiarmid, Kathleen Jamie, Liz Lochhead, and Tom Leonard. And I started writing again.

I think poetry keeps following me around. I never seem to have been able to shake it off completely.

Rob

[Dreamer_87]

Well, as much as I'd hate to admit it, I only started to be interested in 'poety' after going through a lot of drama and teen-angst - in fact most of my early posts to the PFFA consist of horrid abstraction-filled cliched forced rhymed diary entries that we all hear about and wish we could deny their authorship forever afterwards. During that period William Blake was in my eyes the greatest poet that ever lived, which is why the 'best' (in my view at the time, at least) poem I wrote was about losing innocence, with the revolting title of 'the face of innocence' (*cringe*). I was exposed to 'real' poetry around a year later, when I found my aunt's copy of '15 Poets', an anthology including some of the best writing by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Pope among others that was a real eye-opener (pardon the cliche) and I've been hooked on the stuff ever since.

Oh and the PFFA is to blame for my addiction as well.

[gecian]

Oh, bookishness -- and, in the initial stages at least, intellectual snobbery.

[Dark Barde]

If you count the Bible as poetry, then my first exposure was "The Lord is my Shepherd" psalm (23?) in around 2nd grade. Then came Shel Silverstein in 3rd grade, which I had to memorize and perform for some inter-school competition. I don't remember if I won anything or not.

I didn't have to write any poetry until 4th grade, at which time I was so amazed that I could do it that I promptly wrote three poems in fifteen minutes, rushing up to my teacher upon completion of each so that she could see what great stuff I was producing. She must have thought I was off my nut, but she was very nice about it.

From then on, I wrote about a poem a week, more or less. From Silverstein I moved up to Poe, then Blake, then good ole Shakespeare. I actually read "The Wasteland" in sixth grade thanks to Stephen King, as I mentioned in another thread, but I definitely didn't understand it. At this point, it's difficult to remember whether most of my introductions to poets were inside or outside of the classroom, but my final comprehensive education came in 12th grade in the form of "Sound and Sense," one of the texts for the year. I loved it so much that my teacher let me keep a copy, but please don't tell the administration. :)

Everything thereafter has pretty much been polish on the chrome. But to answer the first question, I had no idea we even had a Poet Laureate in the US until late high school; I thought it was an exclusively British thing. I place the responsibility for poetic education squarely on the shoulders of parents and teachers.

[Howard Miller]

Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses at age 5, leading into other things of similar ilk; seeing a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at age 10 got me into reading Shakespeare. All downhill ever since.

[Rik Roots]

how did you become interested in poetry?


Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw -
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.


Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats - T S Eliot (http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/Classes/Summer97/SemGS/WebLex/OldPossum/oldpossumlex/)

[Donner]

It was this poem by Andrew Marvell, believe it or not, that grabbed my attention:

From To His Coy Mistress (http://www.bartleby.com/101/357.html)

&nbsp&nbsp Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Poetry, even poetry from the 1600's, has power to reel you in.

Donner

[earthshoes]

I've been fascinated by words since childhood and was writing poetry before I entirely understood what it was. I think Robert Louis Stevens' "A Child's Garden of Verse" and Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends" helped to spark and encourage an interest in verse.

I continued writing poetry during adolescence for a myriad of reasons. We lived for a long time with almost no television (one snowy channel), the summers were long and I was often bored.
Discovering boys (or should I say heartbreak) also helped emmensely. I also found out that teachers were impressed by anyone who could/or would write a poem on their own so I used them to pad my grades here and there.

I don't remember reading much poetry until my sophmore year when our local public school scored an especially talented and dedicated English Teacher. She brought her own books and encouraged us to read them (An e.e. cummings collection and Robert Frost were the ones I borrowed most often). Though she was strict about spelling and punctuation any streak of curiosity was encouraged. She made us keep journals--a habit I continue to this day and highly recommend.

[Monique]

How: By accident.

When: Three and a bit years ago.

Where: Here.

Why: Damned if I know.

-Monique

[Gabe1]

Someone threw one at me in grade school. I decided to keep it.

[antidora]

Decades ago in English childhood when I lived in a matriarchy of survivors , the only male (my Uncle William - invalid after his long years of colonial service in India, also during Transition) read aloud from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Donne while Grandmama, Mummy and assorted aunts sewed, knitted and embroidered AMGD.
Later he read me the Upanishad, Dante , Goethe and Racine.
When he died he left me his volumes of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Tagore, Kavafis, Ungaretti and Montale.
I try to remain true
antidora

[Porter Doran]

My parents were puritan and forbade us check out any book from the library not written in 1800s. Having devoured all of Dickens by the third grade, I began to cast about for a new source of entertainment (that is all it was to me at that age) and found Walter Scott and Ivanhoe. This led next to his The Lady of the Lake. I read it for the story, certainly -- it made no difference to me to begin that it was a poem. But as I sweated to extract the tale from the stanzas, the clever contortion of the language and the endless beat of the meter began to feel more and more an ecstacy. And upon finishing it I remember holding it closed in my hands, mind numb from the struggle, heart awed that a whole novel might be written in a poem.

[matamoe]

i started to really like poetry in third grade. the first book of poetry i read was Jean Little's "Hey World, Here I am", and i absolutely fell in love with poetry. I started to write some of my own. at first they were really unusual, odes to the sun and earth, not bad for a nine-year-old, but not too much diversity of themes. then i didn't write for about seven years and i started back up about two years ago, with better results.

[Harry R]

I've locked the poll to stop this thread being bounced to the top in future.

Harry

[pepe nero]

I was in Italy at a small place we have there. I was in bed with the flu and almost totally out of it with aches dominating my existence. It was Monday Sept. 11th 2001 about 3:15 when my wife shouted up from the terrace, "A plane has just hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV and saw the second plane hit. I started screaming, 'My God, they've hit the other tower, we're under attack!' Then I went into a deep depression. I could hardly watch what was happening, could not tear myself away. When the first tower fell I knew that the second one would also. My New York loft in a kilometer from ground zero. I knew that America and New York would never be the same again. I love America and I love New York. I could move to Italy, I have no desire to ever leave New York, it means too much to me.
I wandered America when I first got here, for about ten years. Working on the New York and New Jersey docks, as a shill in St.Louis, a competitive cyclist in California, a bartender in Arizona, and so on. I also served two years in the military after which I was awarded citizenship and the opportunity to go to college which I took advantage of although I had had no media school at all in Italy. An army GED test gave me the equivalent of a high school education-in the eyes of the army-and fortunately for me I passed the entrance exams at Washington University in St.Louis.
Back to Sept. 11th. I was in bed, depressed and lacked the energy to occupy myself by painting, my main oiccupation along with teaching painting and art history at an east coast university. Next to me was my laptop and so I started to write. it did not matter to me what I wrote, the activity was important, and I tried to stay with it, then got hooked. I have been writing for three years in September. it saved my life. I truly believe that, that I would not have survived without that laptop.
Thanks all for sticking with this to it's end.
('scuse all nits)

pepe

[Ice-Nine]

My first real consideration of poetry as worthwhile came upon my first exposure to Allen Ginsberg at 17. It was one of the few high school projects that I can say I've retained. Before then, poetry always struck me as a pointless formalist exercise (with those perpetual iambic pentameter exercises), not really suited for modern writing. I learned then that poetry need not rhyme and have explicit metre, that words on a page can be beautiful to read and contemplate. I've since memorized most of Howl, and have developed an unhealthy obsession with the Beat generation.

Full credit must go to one of my teachers, the gentle hipster soul whose dream of an English Ph.D. was crushed by brutal financial neccessity. He was a new teacher, so still had some enthusiasm and contempt for authority. Though he will never know it, he succeeded in inculcating his passion into me.

I wrote piles and piles of miscellany for myself, but when seeking to grow, solipsistic rants are not the best means. So I found the PFFA. And learned that beauty is ridiculously easy to accomplish.

Cheers!