BLOG: Early Morning Musings: My Life as a Poet

The comedian, it is said, yearns to play Hamlet, while the classic tragedian dreams of leaving them rolling in the aisles. A few weeks ago on public radio I heard a young operatic superstar comment that he would like to be on the Grand Ole Opry; while a Jonas brother has gone off to London to play Les Miz.  Baseball pitchers know that, given the chance, they could smash home runs; and the slugger dreams of the day his team needs him to pitch and he tosses a no-hitter.

I do not deceive myself into thinking that I am great at anything and would never have the audacity to call myself a real “author,” but I have had fun writing things for nigh on to 50 years now. I’ve done newspaper stories and press releases and fiction and devotional books and magazine articles and educational materials and columns and around 2,000 sermons, and five books have been published (most of them now out of print) with me listed as the author.

I have never, however, wandered into the Garden of Poetry, and I am convinced that it would be a disaster if I did. I am neither smart enough nor “cool” enough to write poetry.

If I ever thought I did have it in me to be a poet, my confidence would have been shattered recently when I was spending some delightful time wandering around in a bookstore, one of my favorite ways to pass the time. In the back corner of that store (which is where they always keep the poetry) I picked up an anthology edited by my favorite contemporary poet, a former United States poet laureate.

One of the poems in that book (written by another author, not the editor) was a sonnet that consisted of the same four words repeated fourteen times.  Four words.  Five syllables.  Fourteen times.  Now it is easy to lampoon that which you do not understand.  Some modern art, for example, looks to me more like a painter’s drop cloth than a carefully executed work of art.  On the other hand, some of these efforts seem to beg for lampooning.

The same four words repeated fourteen times. That sounds like the kind of punishment my elementary school teachers were fond of giving me. (“Write ‘I will not put bubble gum in Dorothy’s hair’ five hundred times.”)  I guess you have to come up with exactly the right four words. If I tried it, I’m sure one of the words would be wrong. I would write “My cup is brown” fourteen times and that would be a failure, but if I had written “My cup is cerise”, I could wind up in a hard-back anthology. It takes a genius I do not have to come up with a classic poem.

Every now and then reality thumps you in the face with a cream pie, just to keep you humble. That poem was my pie in the face. Poetry is not in my future.