Laura Kolbe: “Before I became a poet and before I became a doctor, I became an athlete. Which wasn’t so very different than either of those—waking at four in the morning to train for track-cycling ‘nationals’ at the local velodrome, or later waking for the university cycling team and marathon team, I entered into days of laps and circles. ‘Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise,’ as Elizabeth Bishop had it. Meanwhile, I was having all the same moods and experiences as any other young person, and I remember how strange and necessary it felt to engraft those feelings onto form itself, trying to distill them into pure power of the legs. This was maybe my first awakening to poetry: seeing how life could be transmuted into something other than itself, be it racing or language, and feeling the shock of accomplishing that change.”
