For those who don’t know, tell us about your history with Mass Poetry. What have you been up to since your time as our Executive Director? I started working with Mass Poetry in February 2013 as the temporary Coordinator of Outreach, Development, and Volunteers for the...
Available now from Presa Press When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover you wanted to write poems? The songs of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Dion and the Belmonts were the first poems I paid attention to, though none of them would admit they were...
Available now at Amazon When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I fell in love with poetry as a high school senior in Ms. Benz’s English class. It was an immediate and sudden revelation. We were each assigned a poet to...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I began writing poems in a high school creative writing class. Back then I thought I wanted to write fiction, but as soon as I started writing poems, I was hooked. There...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I slunk into my first open mic when I was 18. Some guy read and everyone responded with “Mmm”s and claps and snaps. People started talking with each other about his poem! I...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My journey into poetry began with my love of writing as a kid. After that first magical encounter, my writing was encouraged as an extracurricular activity, dropped during my...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I first encountered poetry, as many do, in children’s books: nursery rhymes and other illustrated poems and stories in verse. I loved the music and the wordplay, rhymes and puns...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?I've always thought of myself as a visual artist, not a writer. About seven years ago I was overcome with feeling while watching old family movies. Crying, exhausted, I lay down;...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?I recall nursery rhymes my mother would read and learning to recite Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in elementary school. I think the encounter that was a...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I read dead poets and wrote a lot of blushingly bad poetry on a manual typewriter in high school, and then in college I lucked into a series of poetry classes with Chris...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I still have a childhood copy of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, but it was an English class in high school with Ms. Benz where I truly fell in love with...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I didn’t really know I was interested in poetry and in literature until partway through my time at Wellesley College. When I arrived, I truly didn’t have a sense that I had any...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?My first exposure to poetry was the children’s book, HOP ON POP by Dr. Seuss. I fell in love with the bouncy rhythm of the text and asked my parents to read it over and over and...
Getting to Know Anne Whitehouse & Her New Book, Outside From the Inside
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I was lucky to grow up in a house where poetry and storytelling were loved. My father knew lots of poems by heart and lines of poetry, in both Urdu and Persian, were frequently...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? My first encounter must have been with nursery rhymes, but my earliest recollection of poetry is of my mother reciting A.A Milne’s “Disobedience,” a poem that begins, “James...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? In the early 1970’s, while home from college for the summer, I took a summer writing class at Berkshire Community College, with Ron Atkinson (author of Looking for My Name). He...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Ok, so I need to tell you that a month ago, our house was destroyed in a fire. In my head, I say it like I would as a kid--our house burned down. I needed to start with saying...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I was 12 or 13 in the early 90s, an American tween living in the suddenly former East Germany, my family part of a tiny English-speaking expatriate artist community. There...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Poetry seemed a little exclusive to me when I was younger, a little chi-chi. But that was only because I wasn’t exposed to very much of it. In college I was interested in trying...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? There was no poetry in my parents’ house, and mostly genre prose. Ian Fleming, not Henry Fielding. From first to twelfth grade, I read what teachers assigned, too often less than...