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National Poetry Month: Introductions

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National Poetry Month 2013: IntroductionsI more or less stumbled into poetry during my undergraduate days. I didn’t write poetry when I was growing up. I didn’t even read that much poetry. Prior to college, the extent of my exposure to poetry was found in school assignments and was paired with teachers who didn’t much care to explore “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” or Shakespeare’s sonnets.

My introduction to poetry as a living and breathing thing, then, was somewhat brutal. I was introduced to poetry during a summer class with Dr. Fink. I believe I took the class either because I knew his teaching style (Tough but fair.), because he was my mentor, or because I needed another elective. I know that the class must have interested me on some level; by then, I already had become more selective in what classes I decided to take.

A summer class often is a thing to be dismissed (My Spanish classes certainly fell into that category.), but that was not the case with this one. We covered eight books of poetry within the span of six weeks. I read poetry every day and wrote about that poetry on a weekly basis.

The class itself was about contemporary poets. We read the work of Billy Collins, Natasha Trethewey, Anne Marie Macari, April Lindner, C.K. Williams, Andrew Hudgins, B.H. Fairchild, and Ellen Bryant Voigt. By the end of the class, I was hooked. I was trying to write my own poetry, which has been banished to a notebook somewhere. I signed up for a creative writing class the next semester (of course with Dr. Fink), and the rest is, as people say, history.

How were you introduced to poetry?

Image: erin m (CC BY NC 2.0)

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  1. evelynalauer says

    I’d say my first real encounter with poetry was in college at Iowa. I was taking my first creative writing there and my teacher was a poet in the MFA program there. She was inspiring and saw something in me. She encouraged me to be a poet. If it wasn’t for her, I might be writing fiction 🙂

    • Erin F. says

      evelynalauer How funny! I always thought everyone in the MFA program at Texas State had been writing poetry for years and years and years.
      If it weren’t for my professor…I have no idea. I was a little lost then because of some doors closing. I owe a debt to him. He was a deciding factor in choosing Texas State. He said I’d like Kathleen. 🙂

Trackbacks

  1. […] My own poetry often has few details. I think the shift occurred when I became tired of narrative poetry. I started to focus on other things, one of them being the objects themselves. The physical things – a hand or an elephant – became more important than a plot. The story still existed, but it became an undercurrent. Things were kept beneath the surface, not to be malicious or indirect but because the objects were growing in power. They had their own stories to tell if I’d let them. […]