Did you read poetry as a child? What books made you fall in love with poetry?
As a western Washington State '30s family we had few books. My mother was a reader, though, and every Saturday we drove into north Seattle to check out the university district library and the thrift stores. It seems I heard Whitman, Robert Frost, Poe and Robert Burns before I could read.
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I'm happy to know that Gary Snyder's mom read him poetry.
If anyone asked me this question the answer would be Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats / T.S. Eliot, The Bat Poet / Randell Jarrell, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and Moral Alphabet / Hillaire Belloc, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse / ed. By Stephen Dunning and Edward Leuders, and Edward Lear's nonsense poems. Also those unlikely poetic parodies that used to appear in Mad Magazine at a time when there was an assumption that everyone was familiar with certain poems. (Once upon a final inning/ with the other ball team winning/ and my Mudville teammates trailing/ by a score of 2 to 4... If Edgar Allen Poe wrote Casey at the Bat).
It's not quite fair to say that youngsters these days don't read poetry, though. The strikingly passive-aggressive lines of William Carlos Williams' poem This is Just to Say have become an Internet meme (as I recall, the poem was included in the Reflections anthology). My daughter appreciates This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin.
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