Starting to Write Poetry

In the 2000 edition of The Writer's Handbook, Susan Kelly interviewed then U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. She asked if he wrote poems as a child and he said, "I would always be ... making up little chants in my mind" without recording them on paper. I thought back to the earliest poems I can remember creating. There's actually an extant paper copy of a short epic I wrote at age ten! Prior to that personal Romeo and Juliet saga, I recall carrying about a tiny red plastic note pad case in which I wrote, with a tiny yellow pencil, "Four things, poor things." It was a two-line requiem to the dead animals I had counted along the highway on a trip to the farmer's market around the courthouse in Hamilton, Ohio. The rhyming scheme of Mother Goose had taken fierce hold! Pinsky crafts his works in my style, too: "you're trying to pour your heart out," he said. His Favorite Poem Project continues to record thousands of varied Americans delivering their favorite poetry.