My first memories of poetry were of my mother reading to us as a child - Hillaire Beloc and A.A.Milne. I really liked it. After that, they read the occasional one to us at primary school (usually of the aren't the flowers pretty variety) and I hated it. Despite good experiences of poetry, I came to associate the art form with this kind of rubbish right up until my late twenties.
At the age of nine, we were told a poem about spring flowers and told to write one about springtime ourselves. As a howl against subject matter that meant nothing to me, I wrote:
In Spring
Birds sing
Nice and hot
So what
Go jump in the pool
where it's nice and cool

I got told off for it, but at parents evening the teacher showed it to my parents and it became clear that she had been amused by it.
I eventually got back into poetry through lyrics (from various artists), which seemed to say far more in a few well chosen words than you explain in a three page essay.
I started writing poetry myself when I went to a writing group and they set it as a homework exercise. I would probably never have bothered otherwise. After that, I was hooked. There is no money in it and I continue to write short stories and sell them, but only by writing it and then attending events and listening did I see that it had worth.
So what's your story.

I actually got into writing when I was about seven and I was a big beatles fan at that age I though the lyrics were great and as a result I tried writing my own think the first thing I ever wrote was:
"It was ten to ten in the morning and my dad was sixty four"
That was my shot at writing my own Beatles song! Still cringeworthy to this day but I was only young!
After that I was playing round with words ect but didn't care much about the poetry at school which was all about dragons and flowers.
It was very shortly after when I found my dads Wilfred Owen book that I got really into poetry even at a young age I was really into what I read my him after that though it was a bit of a blur but I still loved playing about with words and phrases.
Got back into it when studying GCSE English and had to study Simon Armitage and thats when I became hooked again although after a year I got bored of Armitage and got hooked onto poets like Garry Johnson, Nick Tocksec and Attila the Stockbroker and shortly after I started going out and performing what I'd written which I'm pleased to say I'm still doing. I even got an Attila inspired poem published in some anthology or another too!

Dylan Thomas for me.
I just sort of realised with him: my god! you don't have to write about classical themes and myths and images an wotnot... It was a revelation that the imagery could come from anywhere, in fact that anywhere/everywhere was best. Oh yes!
But he doesn't make sense.
Look, when you're an adolescent the suggestiveness of his work was Very exciting.
Dylan Thomas is very much The Poet of adolesence. And to be honest there are not that many about for that age.

Thing is I spend a lot of time now trying to get back to that first excitement.
ricardo reis.

A J Tessimunde (forgive the spelling pls) In an English Lit class with Finbar Deloughry (the teacher) I copied down a line from his poem 'Cats' - I just thought it was the embodiment of cats and the most beautiful thing I'd heard before (background inner city comprehensive) that line was "Cats no less liquid than their shadows..." The second time was Keats "Beauties truth..." Then someone wrote this "If a place somewhere, can warm a soul in disrepair, then this is it and I am there." My other 'Heads Up' was from a song "Only women bleed." This lead me towards Haiku and my favourite "This blank page, stares back white with rage' or something close to it?
Gary

I like Spike Milligan's variant which has tuck with me since childhood:

I must go dwon the sea again
To the lonely sea and sky

I left my vest and socks there
I wonder if they're dry?

Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Rainer Maria Rilke, CK Williams and Stevie Smith, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Edward Lear, William Dunbar, Sydney Keyes wowee and Lewis Carroll, Wiliam Blake and John Clare -- beautiful, soul-plumping, mind-mesmerising -- the prose-poetry of Notzange Shange and Kinsella's translation of The Tain. Wondrous words. I used to smuggle these books into the house (bought with Saturday job money or borrowed from the library -- my parents had a thing against books) and stay up reading with a torch. Magical secret world. I can still feel that rush of excitement.

Paul Celan rocks!

Voices from the nettle path:

Come on your hands to us.
Whoever is alone with the lamp
has only his hand to read from.

Charles Bukowski rocks!

Roll the Dice


if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the
way. this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the
worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.
you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter,
it’s the only good fight
there is.


John Ashbery rocks!

The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits

in thunder,

Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,

From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."

Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How

pleasant

To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she

scratched

Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach



And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.

"M'love," he intercepted, "the plains are decked out

in thunder

Today, and it shall be as you wish." He scratched

The part of his head under his hat. The apartment

Seemed to grow smaller. "But what if no pleasant

Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my

country."



Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.

Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach

When the door opened and Swee'pea crept in. "How pleasant!"

But Swee'pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib.

"Thunder

And tears are unavailing," it read. "Henceforth shall

Popeye's apartment

Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or

scratched."



Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched

Her long thigh. "I have news!" she gasped. "Popeye, forced as

you know to flee the country

One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened,

duplicate father, jealous of the apartment

And all that it contains, myself and spinach

In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder

At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant



Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant

Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the

scratched

Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and

thunder."

She grabbed Swee'pea. "I'm taking the brat to the country."

"But you can't do that--he hasn't even finished his spinach,"

Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.



But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment

Succumbed to a strange new hush. "Actually it's quite pleasant

Here," thought the Sea Hag. "If this is all we need fear from

spinach

Then I don't mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon

over"--she scratched

One dug pensively--"but Wimpy is such a country

Bumpkin, always burping like that." Minute at first, the thunder



Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,

The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched

His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

The three writers mentioned above i would like to meet and shake hands and have a beer maybe, a walk and a chat about stuff, about how they do it, and do it well..

Religious conversion initially. When I recovered from that, reading poetry that really made me think. TS Eliot, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, the New York school of poets generally, then increasingly more and more of the avant garde and post avant poets of Britian & America, Apollinaire, etc etc...

Nursery rhymes, rhyming stories, song lyrics, classic films, and my parents used to write poems to each other (I guess that would be a factor as well). In primary school I had to participate in 'declamation' competitions of established poetry as part of school activities. The very first was 'Cat' by Mary Britton Miller, in kindergarten, most of its lines are still fresh to me this day.

Blimey - this is a bit of a bump! Still n all, glad it's here.

For anyone who STILL doesn't know this, what started me was seeing Rachel Bond do a few poems in the Tudor in Wigan one night last summer, having met her previously at a Volunteers gig and clicking with her straight away. Didn't even know she was a poet, 'til she got up on the stage! I'd only gone to see a mate's new band play that night. She blew me away with a poem about her dad. I was moved to tears, couldn't speak, and sat there thinking of all the stuff I could write about...if I was a poet. Hah!

Look what she did and gone done! You can all blame her ;)

I have been a total music anorak since as young as 4 or 5 mind, and lyric-mad.

Being sent on a course to help the children I taught with their writing.
I'd drifted into primary classroom teaching after years as a Science, Geography & ICT teacher so needed some help with my English lessons (I now teach English as a Foreign language to the children for my sins!).
On the course the facilitator put on a piece of music - From the Depths Sound the Great Sea Gongs by Gareth Farr and we were asked to jot down random words and phrases or write a poem if we could.

Colleagues enjoyed the result and, with their encouragement to write more, the rest is history, some three and a half years and 1200 poems later!

For your interest, here is the poem I wrote. Interestingly we weren't told the title of the piece until afterwards. I am still amazed how I came up with an undersea theme for my poem; the composer obviously did a great job!

Deep-water Epithalamium written January 2008

Idling, in the un-plumbed depths,
The gargantuan leviathan slumbers,
Every silver-finned dweller of the deep
Thrills, in uncountable numbers,
In restless, breathless anticipation
For the proximate, long-told approaching
That is the festive, nuptial union
Of the King and Queen of the Ocean.

Now the proud procession passes;
Kelp-bedizened denizens assemble;
Dainty, painted sea-anemones file past,
Writhing, waving tentacles a-tremble.
Now march in the groom’s attendants;
Sea-monsters, wreathed in salt-sprayed wrack,
Observed by shy, long-clawed supporters:
Hermit crabs, with conch shells on their backs.

Jaunty pipefish, sailor-like approach
Writhing past, in serried-rank array,
Sport five-striped, jade-bejewelled apparel,
And reedy, naval-hornpipe dances play.
Snapping, red-backed lobsters pay attendance
With their laughing, clapping, Spanish castanets
And angler-fish shed light upon the scene,
Illuminating eerily the parapets.

The curtseying ballerina jellyfish,
The bridal party, now arrives in state
Elegantly whirling, in twirling pirouettes,
On pebble-strewn, marble promenade.
Darting, opalescent gobies zoom and whizz,
The flaxen-tressed, fair mermaid-bride to see,
Amazing the spectators as they rush,
Untrammelled, with tremendous velocity.

The great whale serenades the august event
And, opening wide his giant, baleen throat
In rumbling, tumbling, ocean-rending song:
Unnatural in tone, yet nature’s deepest note,
Unites the massing, sub-aquatic host,
In peerless, euphonic encomium
To Neptune and his spouse, his tribute bearing
In this deep-water epithalamium.

What made me start writing poetry? Bereavement, basically. If that hadn't happened I probably wouldn't have felt the need. It (the poetry) has certainly helped. And brought me the joy of having a go (occasionally) at performing, which, as a shy person I never thought I'd ever do. Life has a very strange way of panning out!

Hen parties then unhappiness. I'm stuck with it now though, unhappily or not.

Started at school when I was 10 or 11... Never stopped, but it became more about things I needed to writer about when I got a little older and still hasn't stopped I guess..