Marge Piercy: I started writing both poetry and fiction at fifteen, when my family moved into a house where I had a room of my own with a door that shut for the first time in my life. I have written in my memoir Sleeping with Cats published this January about the events that preceded that change in my life: my cat was killed by a boy I knew because we had sold our little asbestos house to an African American doctor. One of my good friends died of a heroin overdose. My grandmother, to whom I was very close, the only person who loved me unreservedly and the woman who gave me my religious education, died of cancer. At the same time, I was becoming keenly aware of the differences between how things were supposed to be, according to school, TV, my parents, and how things really were. Out of my pain and confusion, my desire to find out who I really was and what I really wanted, my sense of trying to figure out what was really going on around me, I began to write both poems and stories.
Richard Matthews: When I was three, I was given penicillin to which I unhappily proved to be highly allergic. I remember my mother reading to me "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" while I soaked in a tub to cool the fevers. I suspect that it all grows out of that encounter somehow.
Cornelius Eady: What got me writing poetry? Rock n' Roll. R n' B. Motown. Lennon-McCartney. Joni Mitchell. Smokey Robinson. Chuck Berry. Van Morrison. Laura Nyro. Carol King. Paul Simon. Bob Dylan. AM radio, which I probably spent too much time listening to. There came a time in my early teens when I wanted to start writing songs, which lead to "dry" song lyrics. And when my homeroom teacher printed four of them in my high-school literary magazine, I somehow began to make the connection between what I had written, and the poems I'd been force-fed in class: Frost, Hughes, Brooks, etc. I found the poems I liked best had the same energy --- and urgency-of the songs I loved listening to. I found I liked writing and wanted to do more.
Billy Collins: I started writing out of jealousy for other poems, initially those of John Donne, but I think before that I was even a little envious of Mother Goose.
Marc Woodworth: Language play is a pleasure to a child and I don't remember the exact moment when that play turned into a conscious decision to write poems. I remember at 8 or 9 writing a longish celebration, in couplets and profusely illustrated, of the Boston Bruins Stanley Cup victory over the St. Louis Blues. I chose not to include it in Arcade.
Mary Jo Bang: Was there was a remembered moment when I first began to write and was it immediately upon finishing reading a poem? No. Not immediately after reading a single poem. But we couldn't want to be poets if we'd never read poems. So in that sense, it was after reading many poems. I wrote poems when I was an adolescent and then my models were quite varied. As I guess they are now too, however different the current from the first. Then it was Dickinson, Wordsworth, Millay, Sara Teasdale (yes, I fear it's true), e.e. cummings and Eliot. A motley crew.
Jeffrey Greene: When I was a young teenager, I wrote songs. I would go through my parents' books looking for poetry that would help inspire my lyric writing, and they had several anthologies along with Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Millay, among others. Poetry itself took on its own special importance. I began to meet poets, go to their readings, and buy their books. I tried my own hand at it and began publishing in small magazines and, at the same time, took some workshops in college. In a way, I came to poetry late. I'd written only a small number of poems by the end of my undergraduate studies and was accepted to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Since then many of my important life decisions have been based on trying to find ways to write poetry.
Honor Moore: The first modernist poet I read was Ezra Pound; a friend gave me his small paperback Selected from New Directions. There is a poem in it, a short poem, called, I believe, "In the Tea Shop" which is about a woman going downstairs. That was the kind of poem that I wanted to find in myself.
