How did you first engage with poetry?
I came to poetry in a roundabout way, through other avenues. I’ve been involved in the visual arts since I studied painting in art school, and fascinations I embraced then continue to influence my thinking. Eventually I noticed my favorite artists often employ text in their artwork, and I slowly came to understand those texts as poetry.
Looking back to childhood, I want to give thanks to my mother, who recently passed away. She read aloud to my sister and me every night, picture books, novels, poetry. I remember liking a rhyme by Hughes Mearns that begins, “Yesterday upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there / he wasn’t there again today / I wish, I wish he’d go away” and will recite it to myself to this day. Mom was a fan of the blues. She loved to play recordings of her favorite singers. Dinah Washington was in heavy rotation, and I became intrigued by (without totally getting) her creative interpretation of song lyrics, the way she’d slip in slyly coded euphemisms, just behind the beat.
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