A Quote by Gerard Malanga
When I started writing poetry in my senior term of high school - I was sixteen - I felt in touch with a secret language. It gave me a sense of identity. I suddenly discovered I wasn't alone.
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I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
I first started acting in primary school, just doing little plays. And from the moment I began, something just went 'click' inside me. Suddenly I wasn't shy anymore. Instead I felt confident and happy. I can remember the enormous sense of relief it gave me. I loved the feeling of making people laugh.
I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.
[Larry Laurenzano] gave me a junior high school saxophone to take to high school, because I was always taking one of our school horns home to practice and I couldn't afford to buy one. He gave my friend, Tyrone, a tuba and he gave me a junior high saxophone for each of us to use at Performing Arts High School with. My audition piece was selections from Rocky. We were not sophisticated. But we had some spirit about it. We enjoyed it, and it was a way out.
High school was the first time I ever saw spoken word poetry. The first place I ever performed a poem was at my school, so in some ways it was the nucleus of how it all started. For me I think high school was a period of trying to figure myself out, and poetry was one of the ways I did that, and was a very helpful avenue to try to do that.
The politics of language and the politics of writing really got to me. I've heard this phrase more than once now: this idea of the poetry wars, or the idea that people within the space of writing are at odds with one another or manipulating language to further one's political stance, manipulating language in ways that really felt dirty to me. All of these things worked their way into and through language for me.
I was a lot smaller in high school, and guys were a lot bigger and faster than me. I stole some bases in high school, but it wasn't until my senior year that I started getting faster.
I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.
Initially I started writing because I felt like I didn't fit in. I just moved to a new school and I felt quite lonely. I think that's where it all started for me.
I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt.
I didn't know until high school that I was interested in writing in any real way. But there was this boy that I had a crush on, and I used to tell him all the time what I felt about him. Finally he gave me a blank journal and said to write it all down - and it didn't take me very long to realize how much I loved writing.
As a senior in high school, I had a strong sense that God wanted me in some kind of ministry.
As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.
I started making music for fun maybe my senior year in college. I started rapping in high school, but it wasn't anything serious.
In my senior year of high school, I read an article in 'Newsweek' about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. I felt a sense of shock - this was happening in the region where I'm from, and people don't know about it. I wanted to understand.
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