My crush started in 10th grade Honors English class. I watched from a distance at first, listening to Poetry speak in iambic pentameter and measured syllables. I asked my friends if Poetry was seeing anyone special, but Poetry was free and available any time I was ready.
I flirted with Poetry for the rest of my time in high school, passing short epistles between classes and using the letters to create acrostics. I taped pictures of Poetry in my locker and we'd sometimes meet for lunch in the quad and I'd whisper sonnets, secrets, and rhyme schemes that I thought no one else would listen to or understand.
Poetry was persistent and followed me to college. In 1996, when I read the Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, I knew Poetry and I were bound together forever...
...so when did you fall in love with Poetry?
6 comments:
Oddly enough, I feel in love with poetry when I was about 6 years old and my mom gave me a collection of Dr. Seuss books. I've been in love with poetry and writing ever since. I don't know what I'd do without it...
...and I don't know either. I just wish I had figured it all out a little earlier.
"Hop on Pop" and "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish" were my favorite Dr. Seuss books.
I’m not exactly sure when I fell in love with poetry. I remember two books I would read all the time when I was 7 years old "Honey, I love" by Eloise Greenfield & Marvin K Mooney Will You Please Go Now! By Dr. Seuss
Ooooo, "Honey, I Love" is fantastical!
I found the symbolists in 11th & 12th grade and it was then at last that literature didn't suck. It was like finding Zeppelin IV, I had to find more like it.
My earliest encounter with poetry (I was 8 years old then) was with the poems of William Blake and the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. Then followed, Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth. And much later Christopher Okigbo (who I consider a poet's poet) Okot P' Bitek and Gerard Manley Hopkins
Writers generally, and poets especially are the true monarchs of the world. There is no one greater than a woman or man who is able to express her/his thoughts on paper and by so doing, light the paths of men forever with a pen.
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