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4.
AOTW: What got you started writing poetry? Was it a poem you read? If so, which one?
X. J. Kennedy: My third-grade teacher made me do it.
Robin Hirsch: As an adolescent I used to write poetry, which like most adolescent stuff, one shudders to remember (it mostly aped Keats, I think, if you want an inspiration). Now I mostly commit prose, and, with the inspiration of my children, verse.
Sonya Sones: It wasn't a poem that inspired me to write poetry. It was a person: Myra Cohn Livingston. I think of her as my poetry mother, because she gave birth to the poet in me. Before I studied with Myra, I was an animator, a photographer, and I eventually became a film editor. Then I had my children, and I stopped editing, because I wanted to spend more time with them. I discovered that I loved reading to my kids, so I decided to try my hand at writing children's books. I enrolled in a class on writing poetry for children at UCLA taught by Myra. And from the very first moment I stepped through the door of her classroom, I knew that I'd come to the right place. She was an extremely demanding teacher who gave mountains of homework and was a very tough critic, but she was the teacher of my dreams. And it was she who set me on the path to writing my first book, Stop Pretending.
Mary Ann Hoberman: From as far back as I can remember, I was making up little poems and songs, well before I could read or write. I have no idea exactly why --- the activity was as natural to me as breathing.
Betsy Franco: I write children's and YA poetry. At one point, an editor at a textbook house asked me to write math poems for an upcoming textbook. I told her I had never written poems before and she said, "Go ahead and take a stab at it." I haven't stopped since.
Alan Katz: The amazing poet Marie Ponsot was my college professor. She did her best to get me to appreciate poetry. But I did everything I could to "Katz-ize" it...parodies, limericks, etc. (My wife had Marie too, and became a great poet herself.) Over the past few years, I have written hundreds of song parodies for The Rosie O'Donnell Show. But it's only recently that I realize that makes me a poet.
Marilyn Singer: My folks always read to me when I was little. I had a Golden Book of children's poetry that I especially loved. I can't remember which poems in particular inspired me, just that a number of them by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, Eleanor Wylie, did. As I got older, I took classes in poetry and discovered Shakespeare, my favorite, as well as John Donne, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many others that influenced my writing.
Paul B. Janeczko: I started writing poetry because I felt that what I wanted to say --- maybe what I needed to say --- could best be said in poetry. Rather than name a poem that got me writing, let me name a poet: Walt Whitman. His poem touched me more deeply than any other poems I had read to that point in my life, which was in the last years of college. I was touched by his spirit that embraces everyone's humanity.
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