At the starting point of my poetic journey, I was ignorant of the genre, very opposed to it (for I couldn’t make the sense out of it) and arrogantly sure that poetry was mostly a scam.
Fortunately for me, a teacher of mine at college had this whole class around Portuguese poets. We had to read them for each other and explain the meaning, while he provided solid interpretations to the texts we were working on.
Thinking I had something in me clearly broken for I could not make the sense of any of the readings we were assigned, I got myself to go the library, picked up one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms to read, and gave myself the task of reading at least a poem a day, trying to make whatever sense I could make out of it — whatever long it took for me to read the whole book. Also, if poetry was supposed to be this highly aesthetic experience, I would have to read the poem (or poems) out loud. And that I did.
When I had finished Pessoa’s book, I felt something was changing in me. Most of the poems still sounded nonsensical, but the ones that worked, the ones I felt I got a sense out of it, really made me feel that I was heading somewhere. So I drudged along.
After the finishing the first book (after a month or two), I picked up another. This time one Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa’s most beloved heteronyms. I can’t exactly pinpoint where the magic happened, but, suddenly, I was no longer the same self that started that journey. Now I was not reading out of obligation, but reading as a necessity. Poetry had gone under my skin, and I was starting to get this huge crave to read more and more poetic works.
To make a long story a bit shorter, nowadays I’m an avid reader of poetry, having read most of the great poets of Portuguese literature. I find particularly at home in the poetic genre and I’m even trying for a masters degree in philosophy working on... a poet!
This to me was the thing that I felt most accomplished by putting myself to master it. Looking back to how I felt before; knowing what I now know about poetry, my thoughts are the exact opposite of what they were in regards to poetry. Now I cannot even imagine how I managed to live my whole life at that point without giving poetry a try.