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...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? It was the summer I turned eleven. I discovered T.S. Eliot’s collected poems on my mother’s bookshelf, along with Emily Dickinson’s work. I was blown away by how you could use...
Everyone comes to writing from different places -- how did you first encounter poetry? Did you have an ‘a-ha!’ sort of moment where you realized you wanted to be/already were a poet, or was it more gradual? I first encountered poetry in elementary school in fifth...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? As a Haitian-born writer, storytelling is something ingrained in my Caribbean DNA and as such I was always interested in telling stories. However, as most Caribbean children can...
A lot of this book is written using language/formatting tied to computer programming, with even the title being formatted in a way that is reminiscent of HTML. Do you have a background in that sort of area, and how did you come to start writing in this mode? The...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Growing up in a small New Hampshire town, I found solace in many places- the woods, the estuary, the railroad tracks- but always seemed to find myself returning to the same spot:...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I was a latecomer to poetry really, outside of the limited exposure in grade school and high school. I remember one Old English Poetry class in college in 1979. But really it...