I might have been six years old when my grandmother invited me up to her massive queen-sized bed with two dozen throw pillows to watch Oprah. It was 2000. The guest speaker was Mattie Stepanek. The 10-year old boy with muscular dystrophy had written several best-selling books of poetry about his short experiences of life.
There was one poem in his book Hope through Heartsongs that I liked more than all the rest of the books combined (my grandmother had bought them all for me), and occasionally I would walk by the bookshelf and pull down that one book, and finger through the pages to find that one poem over and over again.
That was my first experience with a poem. The short concise paragraphs (stanzas) and the vivid images that they gave me were the exact kind of artistic stimulation I needed as a child. I couldn't draw very well, which is what all of my friends were good at, but while they were drawing cars and cartoons and landscape sketches, I was busy writing down words and spelling.
I did a project on Maya Angelou for Black History Month in second grade. Oprah Winfrey, Harriet Tubman and Wilma Rudolph were already taken. So I picked the poet, the backstage hero and badass of the black women I had to pick from. I read her poem "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and her most well-known works and I became hooked on the household poet at the ripe old age of seven.
After my childhood had been enhanced by poetry, it continued to pop up in my life. Poe and Shakespeare became the bread and butter that I needed. I can still quote "Annabel Lee" to this day, just like Shakespeare's "Sonnet 43." Both works had some kind of pull to them that I still don't know what it is; both love poems, they twisted the way I read about love into a form of consciousness.
"When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see / For all day they view things unrespected;" -Shakespeare's Sonnet 43
I don't remember the first poem I wrote. I do remember realizing that other "writers" were weird and I didn't really mesh with the whole "young writer" stereotype. I was a dual sport athlete that wrote poetry--so I didn't really fit in with either group cleanly. I then went to a poetry reading at my school with Noah Blaustein. It was a reading with poetry about sports, it was then that I realized that my worlds could intersect. Then I began to completely envelop myself into the niche world of creative writing.
To this day I have written two plays, around 100 poems, a handful of short stories, and several nonfiction essays.
If you want to look more into the world of poetry I encourage you to look up these poets:
Written
Maya Angelou
Charles Bukowski
Anne Sexton
Etheridge Knight
Terrance Hayes
R. Flowers Rivera
Charlotte Pence
Andrea Hollander
Spoken
Harry Baker
Sunni Patterson
Sarah Kay
Nafeesa Monroe
