Most people start their writing from poetry and then switch, if they do, to prose. For me it was the other way around. I hadn't read very much poetry until high school, in spite of a childhood infatuation with Arthur Alliksaar's glossolalic and at times absurd verse (I can't think of any West European poet with a comparable achievement) and, of course, Juhan Viiding's extremely sensitive, astute and witty poems, of which myself as well as most of my friends enjoyed the witty part more than the rest at the time.
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But when I finally started to write poetry myself - it was during a brief stay in a hospital for a minor operation during my 9th grade - my texts were different from most things that I liked. I have always been extremely form-conscious and only liked pure rhyme and well-built rhythm if the verse had to be regular. Of course I soon found out that there was a lot of such poetry around in the Estonian tradition and soon I started reading all that in large quantities.

Also, around that time, a Finnish friend brought us a gift of an anthology of European poetry, translated into Finnish, with parallel texts in the original languages. Now that was real stuff. Soon enough I had made my acquaintance with the troubadours and the stilnovisti as well as with Baudelaire, Verlaine, the English metaphysical poets and Rilke and many more poets who have stayed with me since, and I even started to try my hand in poetic translation. This was all very good drill, both formally and for developing the poetic imagination, the ability to see things through language, and to capture them more precisely. Admittedly, my poetry has never reached the transparency and simplicity of many authors whom I admire for these qualities. I must have taken too seriously some sentences by Ezra Pound from his "ABC of Reading" that I also read at the time I started writing, especially his "Dichten=condensare". But then, I also like poets who do the same. It has to be brandy rather than beer. Be it as it may, whatever the method, it has to take your breath away in the best possible sense of the word.

(photo courtesy of V.Braziūnas)