Nicholas Ruddock : part two

How did you first engage with poetry? 

My mother knew hundreds of poems by heart. She had prize medals for her accomplishments.

I wrote my first piece (age 7) when my father, transporting a case of beer on a bicycle, crashed in the middle of the street. 

In University (age 19) I wrote two plays in Alexander Pope-ish rhyming couplets, performed for laughs in the annual theatre review. 

Decades before #MeToo, a relation, Margot Ruddock (age 26), in Dublin, was physically and emotionally injured by an affair with W B Yeats (age 67). He recovered his potency, she lost everything. He published six of her poems in the Oxford Book of Verse, 1935.

Those were my first personal engagements with poetry, outside the walls of school.