I was over at Dustin’s place yesterday as part of his National Poetry Month series:

My school was so small we had one teacher for almost every subject, and we sat in desks like elementary school kids, even though we also had lockers out in the hall by the high schoolers. One of our daily tasks was to write something—anything—in a journal our teacher was forcing us to keep in order to make us write something each day. Although I see the value now, back then I resented it, and probably as some kind of “I’m hipper than this” statement, I started using my notebook to play around with poems rather than straightforward introspective writing.

My poet-crushes Denise Duhamel, Sandra Beasley and Mark Bibbins popped up over there too!