It was while my family and I were living in Paris in the mid-1950s that I decided to become a poet. I wrote my first poem there, moved by the storybook spectacle of an elaborate wedding procession we encountered one autumn day. Consequently, this vocation seemed more than just a dreamy possibility: it somehow felt fated, inevitable. At age 6, I knew in my marrow that I was destined to become a writer, just as I knew the sun would rise every day, and the moon would follow it each night along invisible tracks.