But then I went to junior high, and I actually wrote a poem. I don’t know why or how I came to write the poem. I just remember it was a poem about a werewolf, and it was published in the school yearbook. Now, I grew up in a pretty tough, working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, in New York…
When some of the tougher kids in the school found out I’d written a poem, I got beat up, because that wasn’t something a guy did in my neighborhood. So, for a while, I thought that poetry was hazardous to my health. And it probably was.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I became a folk singer. I lived in Greenwich Village. I taught guitar sometimes. I played guitar and sang in coffeehouses at night, and I got to really like blues and ballads from the southern Appalachians and English, Irish, and Scottish ballads. I was really taken by the plainspoken language of these things. I think those things affected my writing more than anything else in the beginning, so I never used fancy poetic devices. I don’t reverse things just to make them rhyme. I really try to write in a natural-sounding way.
