How did you
first engage with poetry?
This is going to sound morbid, but after my father died in 2004 we
needed some lines to put on his headstone. I wasn’t a poet then, just a mere
PhD student, but I didn’t want something clichéd. I wrote some
lines that people liked and ended up on the grave, so that was technically my
first ‘publication.’ After that I just kept writing. I filled a whole notebook
with verses that summer, trying to deal with the shock of what had happened
(Dad died of a sudden death heart attack without any goodbyes to anyone), so
that was the basis of my first book. I would say, though, that poetry was
always in me. When I was a teenager I used to read poems from poetry
anthologies and perform into hairbrushes in front of the mirror like a rock
star. It’s just that where I came from poets were thought of as people from the
olden days, all of whom were dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment