Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Until college I did not have any formal training or instruction in reading and writing poetry besides what was needed to be successful on an exam or standardized test (and a few informal writing groups). When I began to write poems in earnest in college, I carried a lot of fears about what I could and could not write about. My professors would point out how I tended to write around a subject or concern rather than directly at it. Their encouragement, and reading poetry widely and often, unlocked different ways I could consider and write a poem. I once thought of poems as static, concrete things. Now I find a poem slippery, amorphous, shifting in its power and influence within time and context.
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