I was writing from the time I was in elementary school, but much of it was pretty terrible. I love to recite my first poem to kids when I talk to them – because it was so bad that I tell them that clearly they’re writing better poems than that. But you keep writing and working and working and writing, and you get better after a time. It’s like any kind of muscle that you keep exercising. It gets bigger and better.
I could recite that poem to you right now. It goes:
Bus, bus, wait for us.
We are going to school, and we know the rule.
We were going to zoo, but the teacher got sick. Boo-hoo.
So, instead we went to pick berries, but could only find cherries.
The end.
That is truly awful! But I was in preschool, and I could rhyme. I had no scansion, and there wasn’t much of an arc to the poem, or metaphor. But I could rhyme, and that was at least a place for me to start.
