MARK JARMAN: I wrote my first poem when I was 11 for an English assignment. I had to write a poem. And I wrote-- unwittingly, sort of-- a ballad. It took me several days to write. And it was such a great experience, like I'd never had before, that I've more or less been writing a poem ever since. Now what I wrote was awful, but it gave me a lot of pleasure to make it.
I kept writing, but I'd always planned to find something else to do to make a living. I never thought that I would do something where I could just write poetry all the time until I was in college and I was writing poems and I was finding myself skipping class to finish poems or to revise them. And that's when I realized I was making a commitment-- a lifelong commitment to writing. And I had to find a way to support that habit.