Jack Prelutsky — American Poet born on September 08, 1940,

Jack Prelutsky is an American writer of children's poetry. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife, Carolynn... (wikipedia)

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.
I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood.
I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.