The prompt for Haibun Monday 30/03/2020: Snapshots of Our Lives, from Kim at dVerse Poets Pub, is to write a haibun that tells the story behind a poem from our personal archives. This is the story behind How I Knew I was a Poet, my video poem from 2017.

In the Beginning
I first visited YouTube in 2006, and it wasn’t long before I was making videos of my own, including video poetry. As time went on, I joined other video sharing sites. In 2010, one of the vloggers I followed was planning to travel from Chicago to Boston on his motorcycle, and he asked those along his route about meeting up for coffee. I took him to see Niagara Falls, and offered a room and a bed for the night. He told me to visit him any time, offering the use of his spare room.
The following year, we planned a meetup that included four other vloggers. Two of them also were from Chicago, one was from Washington state, and the fourth was from Missouri. Over several days, we visited a blues club, took a boat tour of Chicago’s architecture along the Chicago River, and visited the Green Mill Jazz Club (the home of slam poetry) and The Poetry Foundation. Everyone had a good time, and I had some interesting conversations about poetry at The Poetry Foundation with, little did I know, the woman who would one day be my wife.
I moved to Missouri in 2012.
whispering verses
witnessed by poets
in the beginning
Image: The Poetry Foundation, in Chicago