Sadie Nebula Ankh

I started writing poetry when I was ten. I was in fifth grade in 1980 in a little elementary school in Indiana. The first one was a haiku. I wrote it for my teacher, Mrs. Zinn, and drew a cabin for the illustration. I guess she liked it because she put it on the big bulletin board in the back of the class. Then, other students starting giving poems to her and she kept adding them. She had a bit of a temper and one day she told the class, "Lisa was trying to write a poe-eem! The rest of you are just being copy cats!" Needless to say, this lead to me thinking I was kind of the s**t when it came to poetry if I was only one she considered to have even tried. Even if, admittedly, that was a pretty voicetrous of her and being voluptuous in stature, she, perhaps, was just tired of getting up and down and walking to the back of the classroom and pinning up new ones every day. It could also be that self-expression is advantageous and contagious.