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Poetry dawned on me gradually in childhood. There were a couple of anthologies on my parents’ bookshelf that I felt a pull towards. They were vestiges of their college days and never mentioned. But I gravitated towards them and occasionally made forays into them. One was a soft, sky-blue paperback with free verse poems that punched but punched gently; and the other was a stiff, dark-blue hardback like a starched shirt, with sharp-edged difficult lines that exuded a strange formality. I didn’t know anything about these two different kinds of poetry; but I was attracted to both of them by turns and I would occasionally interrupt my backyard science experiments, model rocketry, horseback riding, BB gun shooting, and engineering of Rube Goldberg Hot Wheels jumps to pull one or both of these volumes down off the shelf and ponder their shimmering inscrutability. I guess maybe it was inevitable that I would eventually find myself writing both types of poems by turns as well—mainly, at first, to a particular girl, but eventually with a wider audience in mind, and finally, and mostly always, to please myself.

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