It's like asking a long-married couple how they met.  Everyone has a different story.  How did you discover poetry?  How did you learn the craft?  What place does poetry have in your life now?  I'm interested to know.  (I'll tell my own story if this post draws interest.)

Rick

had a very enthused teacher when I was 15, been at it since. studied the English Language and its parents in college: Anglo Saxon, German, Spanish, Latin. learned how to read in college. took every kind of writing & editing job I could grab ever since. married a woman who thinks writers should be given a lot of slack, poor deluded woman!

High school. Modernists with a good teacher.

University. Modernists, PoMo, and a foundation on old English stuff.

Work. Unrelated.

Hobby. PigeonBike to promote those story poems I love.

Always loved to read.  Found poetry in high school and loved it - had good EnglishTeachers all throughout school- a few years back my mom handed me a stack of stories that I wrote in third grade (they look pretty long for a third grader  - lol).

How did I learn the craft?  Still learning....ha!  But from reading, then writing a lot of dribble that would horrify me now to look at, then having people tell me what wasn't working and revising revising revising revising.....well, you get the picture

:)

something like that...

M

ps.  Oh yeah, and a somewhat unhealthy obsession in high school with Poe, Nietzche and the Doors and in my late high school /early college years with the Beat Writers and Poets (Kerouac etc)

Earliest memory:  At about 5 years, taking a red crayon and carefully drawing curly-que lines across the end pages of my Little Red Hen Golden book.  I imagined I was writing my first book.

Next memory: Age 7 or 8, sitting at my mother's knee listening to her intone Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud". It was her party piece when she was a kid.

Memory 3:  Family trip at around age 10 or 12 in the 60's to the Fox Theatre on Peachtree Street in Atlanta to see a movie that I don't remember.  Walking to the car we passed a pharmacy that had a table of books on the sidewalk.  All marked 25 cents.  My dad saw that I wanted a book but he told me that I could have all the books I wanted if I would read them all.  He bought me 4 dollars worth that day and I went home with books like Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe (Abridged. Later I read the entire book), Treasure Island, and more classics. My brothers didn't want any.  I felt like a princess. Had them read in about a month and a half.

Memory 4: 8th grade 1966 Bought The Hobbit and I Robot with my own money.  My life was changed probably even more than when I lost my virginity several years later.

Memory 5:  10th grade.  Creative writing teacher wrote on one of my poems:  This has qualities of real poetry.  At the time I interpreted it to mean that I was to be the next great poet. Even bigger than Rod McKuen. Later I realized she was being nice.  After all, she was my mother's best friend.

Memory 6: Left home to live with a musician. Nuff said.

Memory 8: Tried to go to college but life (Husband, kids, work, bills, mortgage) got in the way. Found solace in writing kept it to myself.

Memory 9: Sometime in the late 70's, early 80's I was a graphic artist for Ma bell operating computerized typesetting machines among one of my duties.  Got friendly with the repairman, who opened the world of computing to me.  I bought a TI 64K Color Computer and began trying my hand at programming.  I was never good at that, but soon enough I was using computers for drawing applications, then the net (Thanks to Al Gore, right?)

Years went by and I became good at surfing.  I stumbled across a site called poetrycritical.com (Still in existence and still as chaos-ridden as ever but in a strange way very entertaining. I digress.) On one of the boards, Poetrycircle.com was mentioned.  In 2006 Poetrycircle became my main poetry fix.  

<sub>I had a bumpy beginning, more than most. I was full-board and lodging with a gang of black friars in Oxford. They taught me how not to think. I guess, it was all down hill from there, one thing after another to get nowhere.

cloverleaf

I had to drive no more than a mile
cross the ways some, but a lifetime
of exists and despair as it turns out


Thank you.</sub>






.

You've reminded me to add: lived entirely on books as a child, in a closet with the flashlight when necessary. Here were worlds that did NOT have my mother in them! Marvelous!!!! Walking home from the library with the 12-book maximum stacked higher than I was, and trying to read the top one at the same time!

I didn't come across Mom in a book until I met Lady Macbeth.  It's a good thing I was well hooked on reading by that time.

LOL!

Read as a child...RL stephenson child's garden of verses, AAMilne, When we were very young. now we are six. l
earned by rote, Highwayman, someone came knocking.
Leonard Cohen from age 12...he just about brought me up!
Then O levels larkin, lowell, sassoon, Edward Thomas...
then being wooed with poetry Donne and Marvell, Ted hughes. (of course it worked!) then lyrics Joni mitchell, dori previn, charles causley. 

THEN writing a poem that the idea for had been rattling round my head for 5 years, putting it in a competition and it winning! Wow, I can do this!

Then joining writing groups, workshops, reading writing feedback.
The Craft of poetry by Bejuja?
Travelling to the States to spend a week at Omega at Sharon Olds new poems week (that's where Ken Robson and I met)
Starting a performance venue for poets in East Riding, then taking over a thriving one...

then meeting Milner Place in my home town of Bridlington...he told me about poetry circle.

Where Am I now... I know the rules...enough to stick to them not enough to break them often enough.  Still write mainly at workshops & writing groups.  I need other people to help me deliver the poem. It sits in me until I'm in a place i'm expectd to write then it appears.  I'm a last minute merchant, a deadline girl.

I strive for clarity, relavence, and subtlety.  A believable voice with rhythm.

 

Hahaha - when my daughter first learned to read when she was five, I used to find her at one in the morning in her closet reading....M

My father sat me on his lap and read to me from the newspaper before I could walk.
 
"What's that mean?", became my mantra, and when I was 5, my Mom, out of sheer desperation, bought a 7" thick, Oxford-English Dictionary,
held together with brass rods and screws, and put it on the coffee table, and began a mantra of her own: "Look it up."

You know how one word leads to another...?

And then there were all those other books just sitting there.

Ditto. I remember going through my parents' bookshelves way too young: The Nun's Story and Is Paris Burning? are two I remember.

Parents didn't really read to me. Did that on my own. For my kids, read to them every night. They are now avid, voracious readers.

That is so important Rob.  When we were young and poor (as opposed to old and poor) and the net was a thing of the future, I wanted my kids to have an encyclopedia. So I started buying the Funk and Wagnalls from the grocery store every week.  Every night for years, My son would 'pick out a story' to read at bedtime from the encyclopedia.  I think it is one of the pivotal things the put him on the path to his Doctorate.

We had no books in the house to speak of.  A falling-apart Child's Garden of Verses, and something illustrated by Kipling.  My mother was disdainful of people who read when they should be doing chores -- and there were always chores to do.  She read the newspaper -- all of it -- and Dad the sports page.  My wealthy uncle and aunt tried to get my cousin to read by subscribing to a bunch of young adult history books and I inherited those along with his bedroom furniture when I was nine or ten.  Mom couldn't make fun of them because she respected my uncle and aunt for being rich, and so I was allowed to devour them.  I discovered the public library, too, and  ended up persuading the librarian into letting me into the adult section.  I didn't get struck by poetry, though, until I was a Junior in High School and Sister Bea's crazy out-of-control classroom where the kids tied knots in her veil, pinned notes to each other on her habit, and rolled pennies up the floor, causing her to run up to the front of the classroom every time one hit the front wall.  She never thought to go to where the pennies came from, only to where they went.  Bored of the silliness, I read through the four-volume anthology of English literature on my own.  I remember the day when I found "The Eagle" by Tennyson and said to myself, "I wanna do that!" That was the start.

'...rolled pennies up the floor, causing her to run up to the front of the classroom every time one hit the front wall.  She never thought to go to where the pennies came from, only to where they went.'

She could have been a U.S. economist! Funny, Rick.

I loved Tennyson when I was a kid.

Maybe she was.  Isn't the late sixties when things started to get shaky?

My father was a librarian which meant I got lots of books brought home but owned very few, was read to and learnt to read before I was five.  Age ~8-11 bought books from Boots the Chemists, from 11 haunted the school library and remember best the pink-wrapped Mazo de la Roche series - heaven for being so many.   But poetry?   One night when I was ~9 I was too ill to go to a school event and to keep me entertained while on my own in the houseI was given a hitherto unseen copy of Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury' ... enjoyed the shorter stuff but was never really taken by poetry so much as prose.   Acquired several books of poetry thereafter, but never wrote it.
Not really until I found pleasure in writing with rhythm ... never thought of myself as a poet until Rob invited me here ... and now sometimes, I am.