Question- How does the laureate the poem resonate with you
Answer- I started creating stories when I was very young, playing alone – my sisters are six to seven years my senior, so I often had no playmates and had to entertain myself – but I don’t think any of them made it to paper until I was in third grade. My works then were all fiction. I didn’t start writing poetry until I was in eighth grade; some time that year, I’d managed to hunt down a copy of Karen Finneyfrock’s The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door, a novel I’d been wanting to read for over two years. Celia, the protagonist, was a poet, and from that book I realized that poems didn’t necessarily have to rhyme – before, I’d never been willing to write poems because of how difficult I found rhyming. Later that same year, I wrote my first poem as part of a deal to myself: that even though I was having trouble with stories, I would create something and love it for what it was, just to write something, anything. That first poem may have been terrible, but it was satisfying, and I began to write poetry more and more often. I think the reason why I never hated my poetry the way I sometimes hated my stories was because I wrote stories with ambitious intent to publish and thus set higher standards, whereas with poetry I simply wrote to enjoy it.
