gc cohen : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I was eight or nine, and I was rummaging through the kitchen cabinets in my childhood home. I found a stack of books – mostly cookbooks – but one stood out to me: ee cummings’s 73 Poems. I poured over it, and was astonished because I’d never read anything like it. It made me want to write for the first time, and I spent the next several years journaling and writing crappy poetry throughout my adolescence, which I later burned because I didn’t think it was any good. (I sometimes still mourn the loss of burning all those notebooks.)