Oh, I'd written pages on pages of very bad poetry (now, I fear, defunct) in elementary school. I stopped pretty much as soon as I transferred into middle school, and with one exception in high school, I didn't write any until college. A close friend gave me T.S. Eliot's Inventions of the March Hare, a collection of early drafts and juvenilia, and I think my subconscious said, "Hey, if all of Eliot's early poetry sucked, and he went on to write The Waste Land—you, too, sweetheart!" I started writing poetry in the spring of my freshman year. It was mostly still very bad. Winter of my sophomore year, my creativity actually kicked in, and I got "Hallows." I've never looked back. Well, yes, all right, I have. But at least it's mostly been looking back and thinking, "Heh. That doesn't suck half as badly as I remembered it did!"