How did you first engage with poetry?
I like to tell this story because it’s probably the least romantic poet origin story you could have. I was 14 and depressed. I felt I had nothing going for me. I looked around at my peers, and they all seemed to have things they cared about: sports, music, dance, acting, whatever. They were all doing something; they were active participants in the world: chests burning with exertion, minds humming with activity. They were contributing.
Me? I was nothing but a consumer, a pudgy nerd who spent all his time reading books, playing video games, merely devouring the things other people made. I made nothing of my own.
And so one day, on the bus home from high school, I decided: Fuck it, why not write some poems? I liked reading, and writing seemed to be the active counterpart of that pastime. Writing made something tangible happen in the world, the same way that my more athletically inclined classmates made something tangible happen in the world when, say, the bat cracked against the ball and sent it flying beyond the farthest reaches of the field in gym class.
To put it bluntly: I started writing because I sucked at sports.
We had been reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in English at the time, and it didn’t seem that hard to write fourteen lines. So I did – I wrote my very first poem on that bus ride, a terrible sonnet that had much more in common with the melodrama of third-wave emo (think: Fall Out Boy, Northstar, the Blood Brothers) than Shakespeare. But, hey, I enjoyed it. And ~20 years later, here we are.
No comments:
Post a Comment