When I was 18 and living in my mothers apartment, I read The Wasteland, by TS Eliot. I was uneducated about poetry, but had written in journals since the age of 7. My own writing attempts were pale and clumsy. But I remember this one particular day when I found the Wasteland. I recognized the rhythm in the language; I saw the architecture; it appeared as a building, a thing, where words lived on top and breathed. I remember feeling exuberant when seeing this, and trying to explain it to my mom. I read it aloud hundreds of times. My happiness fell on deaf ears.
Later, in school, I took a class on Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. It was during my undergraduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They had the most interesting liberal arts classes, taught by inspired teachers. This course was taught by Paul Ashley, who came from Grinnell College. There were only 7 of us in the class, which made it lively. In his course I learned about the technicalities of poetry, and things like iambic pentameter. I found this fascinating, but the initial discovery I made on my own, by listening to the rhythm in the text, was the understanding that has lasted.
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