How did you first engage with poetry?
I had to write terrible rhyming poems in school. My parents both love to read and we grew up memorizing Shel Silverstein and Dennis Lee. There were always poems around and we had a very large library in a closet in our house. When I was 13 my dad gifted me a Rumi book and then the Leonard Cohen anthology Stranger Music. After that I spent hours upon hours alone in the library poetry section sitting on the floor reading. Between my parents and the library I found my biggest first influences, Yeats, Lillian Allen, Keats, Rumi, Brautigan, Rilke, Lorca, Gibran and on and on it went. When I was in grade 11 I put together an entire show, for a project in Drama class, of poems from the holocaust. I failed English 5 times in High School. I moved to an Alternative High school in grade 12 and my teacher there encouraged me to make a book of poems to be read out loud. I started performing them at school fundraisers and at 17 I fell into a really great group of weirdo poets at a reading series at a local coffee shop. Somewhere in there, I fell hard into a spoken tradition in my own work.
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