When did you consider poetry?

[dukealien]

Have you always read it?
Was it an accident?
Did you pick it up in school?
From a significant other?

I've always listened to music and never considered it poetry.  I've read poems in classes and never considered them musical.  A girl once told me my life was a poem, I was a lost boy, and after 10 years of writing music I found this poetry website, had all my stuff picked apart and found a new love for form poetry.  

When did you snap?  Was it a flurry?  A puzzle? An exercise?  Ive met people who like writing reading and reciting poems but I still don't understand it.

I was exposed to poetry in the usual doses - High School English classes, then bonehead English (for STEM - or is that egghead English?)  in college.  From time to time I'd write a sonnet - usually not romantic - more interested in the chess-problem aspects of rhyme and meter than anything else.

Then in retirement, with more time, I picked it up with encouragement from a significant friend, also retired, in the academic English game.  Who suggested looking at online poetry fora.  And here I am.  (Per Hokusai, in another seventy years I might get almost good at it.)