How did you first engage with poetry?
Poetry happened to me. It was at my father’s funeral. I didn’t even realize it happened at the time. But I wrote my first poem at my father’s funeral. I went off to write in my journal which I carried with me everywhere I went. Only this time it was all fragmentation. I was hiding behind a tree, unable to finish a single sentence. These indeterminate lines and half-expressed thoughts mirrored the sense of confusion I felt. And the fragmentation was truer than anything I had experienced before. My way of writing changed forever.
I realized later that these unfinished collections of lines and blank spaces might be called poems. They weren't like the poems I remembered reading in school. It was a revelation. I felt poetry was an absolute miracle and, strangely, I realized it was actually something I had always been doing, combining words and blank spaces, images and words together on the page.
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