“I hate poetry,” or so I said to my friend Matthew Huddleston one morning walking to the cold showers at Beijing Foreign Language Normal College. The college administration had decided to clean the 100+ year old hot water pipes by running hydrochloric acid through them. Aghast, Matthew then took it upon himself to memorise and recite a poem to me every morning on the way to the showers (limited by the one poetry collection he had) for a week or two. Until then, my experience with poetry had been limited to Ms. Schofield's AP high school English class, and was the primary reason I changed my university plans and decided not to be an English major after all. Forced not only to memorize poetry, but to analyse it through the Jungian, Freudian, Marxist, Feminist and what-knows perspectives as well as identify the Christ figure, I rebelled and my brain shut down. I either like a poem or I do not, no further analysis required. So Matthew's attitude was a revelation. As a result, I came to appreciate some poetry, in particular, the ones Matthew recited to me those days in 1987: Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go gentle Into That Good Night,”, Yeats's  “Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven.” For many years I kept a copy of the Yeats poem in my wallet until I found it disintegrated sweaty tatters of it when I very occasionally cleaned out my wallet. Of course there is also the classic Waterboys song I also love set to Yeats's "The Stolen Child." Today, I like Ferlinghetti, especially his "It's A Wonderful World to be Born Into;" Robert Frost;Christoph Meckel's "The Goldfish;" Neil Mccarthy; Stephen Murray; Sara Wingate Gray; and Michelle Bapttiste.

My approach to poetry is much the same I have to art, music, wine...life. This is mirrored by a chance meeting in a hostel on the Isle of Skye in 1989 with Chris, an English bird watcher. Chatting in the kitchen one evening while cooking lentils, he invited me out the next morning for a spot of bird watching. Birdwatching?! But I was curious I think more about bird watchers (and the recently encountered train spotters) than birds, so I joined him and his friend down by the shore the next morning. Borrowing his binoculars, I asked occasionally, to keep up my end of the conversation, “what is that one?” Chris' response was a shock, “I don't know.” And so it went. Lacking was a notebook, score card, bird identification book, or any of the traditional trappings lampooned as evidence of his hobby. “I just like to watch birds,” he said. Just so.