K.I. Press : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

In grade three, I had read the Alice books so many times that I realized that I memorized parts of them without even trying—especially the poems. So, I started memorizing poems on purpose: everything in Alice (I can recite “Jabberwocky” in both English and French and do a mean “Walrus and the Carpenter” to boot, though I’ve forgotten many of the others), then the poems in Roald Dahl books, then traditional ballads and Robert Service poems, Dennis Lee, and Tennyson and anything else that Anne Shirley might have recited. My mom was taking university courses by correspondence when I was in grade three, so I got a lot of my material from the Norton Anthology of Poetry (there was no bookstore in my small town, not a lot of poetry in the library, and this was way before the internet). I probably reached the height of my informal poetry recitation career in grade five or six, though in high school I got turned on to Shakespeare soliloquies.