How did you first engage with poetry?
One of my earliest memories is of being on a tire swing in my backyard in South Carolina singing songs I made up; I must have been five or six. I remember that’s where I went to invent—on that swing, by myself. Something about the motion of my tiny body moving through space, back and forth; I remember pumping my legs back and forth as hard as I could while looking up at the lacy branches umbrella-d over me, the clouds, the birds, and singing songs about wanting to be up there in the sky, flying over everything. I think that’s a good metaphor for what attracts me to poetry or, maybe, just evidence that I’ve always been drawn to the power of poetry---its roving eye, the suspension of the writer between heaven and earth, the necessary loneliness of it, too. I had a noisy, chaotic upbringing and poetry was a way for me to separate and make sense of my world…or if not make sense of it (because does it make sense?) empower me with the ability to voice my truths, to embody in words the human impulse toward sense-making. It’s a good thing I was satisfied with writing song/poems, since I’m a terrible singer and even worse musician (just ask my 7th grade band director who asked me to pretend to play my flute during concerts)!
My grandmother and my mother both read to me and my siblings from the time we were very young. Lots of Dr. Seuss, of course. And Shel Silverstein. Those silly, rhythmic, witty poems are still there in my own poems, I think, in my attraction to satire and persona.
Much later, when I became an English Lit major in college, I engaged with poems as cultural artifacts, as objects of study. I was studying early British women writers and asking questions about how they used poetry to challenge society and their role in it. I loved uncovering the rebellion in their words. The more I read, the more I saw contemporary women writers in dialogue with that maternal heritage and, of course, with each other. I wanted to be part of that conversation.
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