First love ... what was yours? (An invitation)
Hi Everyone,
I came across this “First Loves, Remembered” series on the Poetry Society website:
https://poetrysociety.org/search/results?q=First+Loves%2C+Remembered
It got me thinking about how hard I fell under poetry’s spell in my late twenties. My earliest crushes? Federico García Lorca (of course), Octavio Paz, Wallace Stevens, and Pablo Neruda. Years later I wrote the introduction for this edition of Neruda’s early collection, Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair:
What were your early literary crushes?
Abrazos,
Cristina
While scanning 100's of emails, the title caught my eye and of course made me think of high school. Then as I read further, my first thought was on the place where I fell in love with words (around age 5). And so, after a long time of not writing anything, I began to write about kindergarten and the mystery of sounds forming words, the beautiful young teacher who took me into the world of reading and on a journey of love that has never left me. (Caregiving sucks the life out of a person, leaving very little for writing.)
Thank you for a beautiful respite!
My high school (memorizing stanza after stanza of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and college teachers (learning how to read Chaucer in the original Old English out lout to the class) did such a good job of getting me to hate poetry that I am slowly falling in love now. Julia de Burgos, Claude McKay, Lucille Clifton, Ntzoke Shange, Alice Walker, Martin Espada, Ida Faubert (Haitian), Peggy Robles Alvarado, Amanda Gorman, Carmen Bardaguez Brown. I'm working on it.