This is a question that I have always asked myself throughout all of my years of writing. Out of all of these years this is the first time I have actually sat myself down to write about it. I have been writing since I was 13 years old. That would be about 30 years now since I first put pen to paper. I fell in love with the written word at the library, the school library to be exact because back then though I knew book stores existed I had never been to one. Buying books was not on the top of the list when your single mom is working hard just to keep food on the table.
The library was my haven. Everything I could digest I read. My first favorite was Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. I must have read it at least three times. I didn’t understand it the first time but I remember the exact moment I did understand it and that I was hooked! After that first understanding books became everything to me. I traveled with and through them everywhere. I read fiction, non fiction, poetry, art, traveling magazines, everything that peaked my interest.
Still, although I wrote, I did not begin to write poetry until I was 17 years old. I don’t remember exactly how I began to write poetry or what inspired me. I took college writing courses but those were vested mostly in english literature which was my major.
I just loved writing. It became my passion along with reading but I was not attracted to short stories or to being a novelist my work always seemed to take poetic form from the beginning. Even my thought process came in spurts and one liners. It has always been difficult for me to write something that is not poetry but it doesn’t stop me from trying. I am a writer after all.
That is why I have always questioned if poetry is learned or if you are born a poet?
I was born a poet although I know that reading opened me up in many ways. My vocabulary and understanding have grown immensely through my love of reading and many of my teachers and professors enhanced and nourished that love but i believe that I was already a poet. I needed only to discover it within myself and develop it. In my opinion you are born who you are going to be, talents intact. Just as musicians are born with an ear for music and painters with an eye for art, I was born with the mind and hands for words.
So, I guess I answered my own question, but what do you think?
