At what point did you know?

These stories are so great! I don't know why they make me smile so much. I'm sure I am crazy!

such great experiences and stories everyone.

when I was a nipper I used to write poems but I never studied anything further than gcse and as I grew up and found money and parties and, well you can fill in the blanks.

Anyway I watched one of Adam's videos last year, wrote a little sonnet and posted it on a notorious poetry sub Reddit.

it got load of uovotes and tonnes of comments.

that kind of gave me an ego boost and I thought, well maybe this is something I can continue.

I wanted to chase poetry out of financial gain. Once I heard about this get pay for what you love concept. Nowadays the only person I had seen that's manage to do that is @Adam Gary. Now I chase it doing things I have never done before,such as poetry cove academy and @Suchita Senthil Kumar blogs for testing my limits.

I wrote my first poem on January 30th-31st 2014. I celebrated my 8th year anniversary two months ago. At the time I wrote poetry because I couldn't act. Now I did act later and love it. Also love poetry too. At the time,as I mention in my second poetry cove series,which started last night,it was an extra credit assignment. I share poetry with my friends and they said I was great. Might be surprising for those that are and are not fans of my work,because I didn't believe them at first. Then I wrote more and more and realized they were write. I was and still am great again.

So great a friend of mine told me to publish my work. I did laugh since I didn't believe him. Now I did technically publish my work,on poetry cove radio,poetry cove series(The Galactic Times and 7 Wins) just happen later.

Since then,my newest phase is to perform or publish. Which allows me to explore desire and understand spiritual world alot more. With potential to play video games again after 8 years. And when I have something worth saying,I'll say it. Which makes this the most freeing phase of life and poetry I have ever live through.

I had never written poetry until my first year of college. I originally went to school to be an English teacher, and as Such was required to take a creative writing course. The one I picked was “Poetry Writing” and I fully expected to hate it.

On our first class session the professor (George Eklund, look him up) asked us to introduce ourself and “share what our relationship was with Language.” When it came to me I said I’d never written poetry, but that I liked writing essays in English and history classes. He said something about how ”the essay in many ways is the purest form of language-making,” which made me feel more welcome among a group of folks who were regularly writing short stories and poems.

That week we had our first writing assignment, where we were instructed to go somewhere quiet and meditate for 15 minutes, letting our imagination go wherever it wanted to. Then after the 15 minutes we were to free write for another 15 minutes. Again, whatever came to mind was supposed to hit the page.

When my first timer went off, I grabbed a pen and papers and I BLED onto that page. This was outside of class time, but I happened to be in the library where he held other BFA classes. I ran into him with the paper in my hands and said “Dr. Eklund - I just finished my first assignment…would you read it?” And he was happy to read it. He muttered “oh wonderful…” under his breath. In hindsight…it was not wonderful writing lol. But I think he was more so reacting to the playfulness in it rather than the actual writing itself.

After he’d read it he asked “I get the impression you’ve never written anything like that before…right?” And I nodded and he replied with something like “you never get used to it.”

And I was hooked. Been writing poetry since.

Man! I love both these stories @Rachel Glass and @Shen Friebe !!!

Does it make me odd that reading about people‘s poetry journeys gets me pumped!

😂😂😂

I love the fact that you had one particular writer who served as a major catalyst for you to write, Rachel. That really goes to show how powerful the poet is.

My experience was very similar. I have always been a writer; before film-making or film producing, before telling a story with a camera, and before poetry. I always wrote, and I enjoyed story-telling (I was one of those little kids who told lies about my life and the people in it, lmao. Not for any intentionally manipulative reason, funnily enough, but just because I loved telling stories. It took me a long while to realise that- but it still doesn't mean I should have been lying!!).

I remember writing poetry from the age of 12 or so? Can't remember how or why I started, but I know I didn't write too often.

I developed a deeper interest in poetry from the age of 17 when I enrolled in an English Lit class at high school. I loved my teacher Ms Batch (she's a wonderful, wonderful lady, and I have her to thank for my journey through poetry). It was she who introduced me to Blake and more of Shakespeare's texts. And she also introduced me to Katherine Mansfield whose stories have stuck with me for years. I guess it slowly snowballed from that point on. I wanted to express my thoughts and feelings the way Blake, Mansfield and Shakespeare did.

Oof. Excellent question. I think my story is two fold. I was about fifteen, studying English Literature AS. I was a nerd and my school let me take my GCSE a year early so I could take an AS a year early, too. We studied this poem, 'Mean Time' by Carol Ann Duffy. Up until that point, I hadn't enjoyed Duffy's poems. But that poem really moved me and we were tasked to write our own poems with the prompt 'Mean Time'. I started writing my own poems from then on but I don't know why but I thought poetry should be sad so my early work is not fun to read.

Then I was on this site called Stumble Upon which would suggest a random website for you based on your interests. I don't even know if that site still exists. But it brought up the video for Sarah Kay performing her poem 'If I Should Have a Daughter'. I don't know. It was my first experience with spoken word and my first experience with a happy and hopeful and empowering poem. I watched spoken word/slam poetry on youtube all the time and I somehow believed I should write like that and so then my poetry became the overemotional spoken word style. That's not a criticism, I love spoken word, but it's obviously a different style to written poetry.

And now I've settled on a poetic voice that is purely Rachel. But those are my two most notable experiences with poetry :)