How did I become a poet? I don't know, actually. In elementary school and well into high school, I wrote constantly-short stories, poems, pose, and little antidotes. My mother said it was my dad's fault I write so much. "Your dad tried to write, since he couldn't he had you to do it." However, my dad wrote countless books that have yet to be taken off the shelves to be polished. My mother wrote in her personal notebook. She'd have and still have piles of books stacked next to her bed.

         Maybe I became a writer because my parents wrote. Is it hereditary, I thought? I felt that being a writer was part of me, and when something good comes from my words I type I smile. How did I become a poet? One morning, I woke, jumped up, and shouted, "eureka!" I'm a writer.

         My writer's touched started to drain after high school due to medical concerns. Now I'm just a writer who can't write. I spit out poetry, but have failed to take up the short stories I used to write growing up. The thing about writing is that you have to keep at it, keep pushing yourself for one more word, one last stroke until there is no ink left in your favorite pen. The older I am, the more I understand what it means to be a writer. When I understand this, I can focus on what I do well in. How did I become a poet? I became a poet because I write poems. Simple answer to me, and I sit and write this to every other beginning writer who wonders who they are as they are writing or typing; where is this going? Can I make money from this? Why can't I stop? I need a new notebook? So many thoughts run through a writer's mind that we turn ourselves into a literary vertigo.

So, after telling you how I became a poet, here are some of my poems I've written and I'm still trying to find the old poems brushing off the dirt and mildew to post in this anthology.


Carlita Jamelson*