I have always been a poetry lover.  From the time I pored over the dog-eared copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses that had belonged to my own mother, I was hooked.

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

This was the first verse in my favorite, The Swing.  I read it over and over, enraptured by the deft and lyrical play of words that so delighted my nascent ear.

My early love has been borne out in my life as a reader. I read poetry frequently, both old favorites and new discoveries, and memorize it too: I’ve probably got fifty or sixty poems committed to memory, and I recite them to myself, when I crave a private incantation, or occasionally, if tolerant company permits, out loud at a dinner party or social gathering, my one and only parlor trick.  When I read the Wallace Stevens poems that begins, Poetry is the supreme fiction… I thought, Yes! and wanted to stand up and cheer.

And yet my love has always been incomplete, as I cannot write poetry. Can. Not.  I tried, unsuccessfully, when I was young and was so discouraged by the wretched results that I gave up trying. This was a source of great frustration to me.  Why was the muse of poetry, so withholding and elusive? Why had she never touched my shoulder with her magical hand, or spread the glittering fairy dust she must possess over my attempt at verse?

I have never been able to answer this question but since I began writing—and receiving some validation for—my fiction, I gradually ceased fretting about it.  Fiction was demanding, intoxicating and utterly fulfilling; I had nothing to complain over. I would write my stories and novels, and remain on the sidelines of poetry, a devoted reader but never a writer.

But then I came to writing The House on Primrose Pond in which a character, an amateur poet, uses his poems to woo a woman he loves.  He’s married and as is she, so there are serious obstacles between them.  But he begins penning verse that he sends, signed with a nom de plume, to the local newspaper where she is the editor of a section called The Poetry Corner.  The poems charm and touch her, and as she begins to understand their coded message, they intrigue her too.  She wants to know who wrote them and she sets about to uncover the poet’s identity.

I had a lot of fun with this plot development, and felt I could use it well to draw out the courtship between these two mismatched souls.  But I realized if I were going to make it work, I was going to have come up with some actual poems, a task that felt like being asked to spin straw into gold.  How in the world was I going to do that?

At first I thought I would borrow the work of another poet. Of course I planned to give credit where credit was due.  Yet that seemed too easy, and even cowardly.  No, I was going to have to come up with those poems the old fashioned way, to paraphrase that old commercial from Smith Barney: I was going to have to write them. 

I decided there would be three poems—one of pursuit, one of celebration, and one of good-bye when it was clear the affair was over.  I kept in mind that the character was an amateur, not W.B. Yeats or W.H. Auden. I was not struggling to write great, immortal verse. I only had to write the kinds of poems he would have been capable of: earnest, not brilliant, heartfelt, not epic and enduring. And being released of the aspiration to be great gave me a lot of room to experiment, and even enjoy.  For the first time in decades, I was writing poetry.  That it wasn’t any good was not of consequence to me. The poems had a job to do: reveal character, advance plot, and provide some interest on their own. And they fulfilled their mission.

I started out with dread and ended awash in gratitude that I had stretched myself enough to tackle the task.  Who knows what other literary goal I might reach for in the near future?  I might even surprise myself once again.

* This post was originally published in January 2016.