I began writing poetry almost by chance in my mid-thirties near the end of a day hike up to a Catskills fire tower. At the time, I'd started working at a small environmental magazine, a job I loved after spending too much of my twenties as a blocked wannabe fiction writer. Finally, I'd given up--literally, I tossed all of my fiction notebooks into a black hefty bag that I dropped beside the parking meter out front for the morning trash pick-up--and pitched a story to the weekly paper in Hoboken. Thus my journalism career began and led me after a few years to an environmental magazine, an ideal fit given my love for hiking and the outdoors. I felt young again, ready for a new career.

For a gift my wife gave me Gary Snyder's No Nature: New and Selected Poems not because it was poetry but because he was a famous environmentalist. In fact, we hated poetry. We'd read a poem called "Dust" from The New Yorker in a faux Park Avenue accent and find it even funnier than the cartoons. So affected, so pretentious. But the first poem in the Gary Snyder collection described a simple, Zen-like moment at a fire tower, "Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout," and I felt transported back to my favorite college experiences hiking in the High Sierras in California. Call it First Love with a poem.

For a weekend getaway my wife and I were guests at Zen monastery in the western Catskills. I found it almost impossible to sit cross-legged without feeling like a cripple, so I snuck off for a fire tower hike. On my way back I came upon a porcupine lying on the dirt road, fresh roadkill. What shocked me wasn't its death, but its color, its coat spilled open to reveal its quills bright and blond as toothpicks. Here I was, a budding environmental reporter in my mid-thirties, who didn't even know what a porcupine really looked like, assuming it to be dark brown like the quill tips.

I felt a yearning to leave city life to learn what the natural world was about and in several years I did leave Manhattan and my marriage for a Catskills log cabin. But in that moment I felt inspired to write a little Gary Snyder-like poem in memory of this porcupine. In those years, I was an avid journal keeper, but I decided not to spill a slew of words but to distill by saying a few that would say a lot. All these years later I don't remember what I wrote save that I liked it and started seeing little poems everywhere. By the end of the day I'd written half-a-dozen. The sparrow droppings on the wooden porch. The Buddha statue reflected on the still water pond. Poems could be anywhere if I sat still and looked.

I didn't stick to Gary Snyder's style for long. A decade earlier, I'd taken a workshop that encouraged both my writing and my writer's block so I'd quit. It had been led by a poet whose work often read like memoir of his being raised in a family of Jewish immigrants in Rochester, New York. Soon I was writing my own life experiences in poems. (He used ampersands. I still use ampersands to this day.) Was I truly writing poems? Did I care? The truth was, I'd found my way around my writing block, and I wasn't going back.