How did you first engage with poetry?
I started out writing songs for a band I was in in middle school. Terrible songs. They’ve thankfully vanished. I know youthful writings are generally embarrassing, but… yikes. I was never a great musician, either. My friends that I was in the band with are actually still playing! I’ve lost touch with them, but they’ve stayed close and, I think, still play together. So that’s pretty cool. But I began writing songs, then when I left the band in high school and dropped all musical ambitions, I stopped writing anything. Then there’s a blank until I met this one girl. Her and I become close, and I start telling her about my band days and show her the current music of the guys I played with, which impresses her, which makes me jealous; so I mention that I wrote songs and show her some of the lyrics. She assigns me homework: write more. She gives me a deadline: a new song by next week. For years I always called poems ‘Deadlines’ because I would always say I can’t write poems, so I called them songs, then called them ‘deadlines’ (even though I was always late turning them into her). Now it’s become about trying to impress Time, but it all started out trying to impress a girl.
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