Not quite poetry today – but a lovely article about poetry: finding poetry, and keeping it in one’s life, as happened to Tessa Fontaine.

There is something magical in the tale of how, at age thirteen, she stumbled into a reading of Indian poet Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and this opened up a new world for her. And through the years, what she found that day informed her taste for poetry and her perception of life.

I love the way writing – be it poetry or prose – can happen at the right moment, and answer certain questions that, especially when we are very young, are no less vital for being mostly shapeless until the moment they find an answer.

Also, I’m trying to remember what my first favourite poem was – and don’t quite remember. I used to be a mostly-prose kind of person, when I was very young, and even more, perhaps, already a story kind of person. At thirteen I tended to like narrative poems – for the story in it, more than anything else… Still, there must have been a first poem, at some point, an epiphany, a something.

I’ll have to think about it. Meanwhile, here is Tessa Fontaine, in Work in Progress.

And what about you? What was your first favourite poem?