How did you first engage with poetry?
I had always “liked” poetry, but I didn’t really get hooked until I was in college. I remember one day in particular. I was taking a standard American literature survey class the assignment was to peruse our poetry anthology and note any poems that intrigued us. I still remember sitting in the dining hall, thumbing through Robert Diyanni’s Modern American Poetry: Voices and Visions. Somehow, I found myself turning to pages that had W. S. Merwin poems on the left-hand page and James Wright poems on the right-hand page. I remember reading Merwin’s “A Door” and “When You Go Away” and Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry Ohio” and “The Jewel.” Almost immediately, I could feel the entire room moving away from me, as though it were on a conveyor. I had never encountered anything like those poems—dark but beautiful, accessible but otherworldly, grave yet lyric. Reading those poems in that book on that day changed my life.
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