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Poet Roundtable
4.
AOTW: What got you started writing poetry? Was it a poem you read? If so, which one?
Daniel Mark Epstein: I have always loved poetry. I started writing poetry at age ten, before I even knew that I was writing poetry.
Robin Robertson: Reading poetry started the writing of it.
Carol Muske-Dukes: My mother got me started writing poetry. One of my earliest memories is of her reciting poems. (I recently wrote an Op Ed piece for the NY Times about this --- about my mother's generation, perhaps the last generation of Americans to memorize poems and orations for "elocution." They had pages and pages of words by heart --- and could "quote" readily.) My mother could (and still does) recite Shakespeare and Milton and Tennyson and Dickinson. One of my earliest memories is of her pushing me on a swing in the backyard and reciting Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Swing" as she pushed me out into the blue air.
Mark Ford: It wasn't any single poem. I read a lot of poetry at school, and we occasionally had to write poems also. It's worth remembering almost everyone has written a poem at one time or another. Some people just keep doing it, for whatever reasons. I remember my niece, when she was about 7, exclaiming in tones of horror, when my first book came out, "What! You still have to write poems even though you're grown up!" For me, it was reading the work of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara at college which made me feel I might be able to write myself. They weren't very well known in Britain at the time, and their care-free attitude to the business of writing seemed very fresh and inspiring.
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