Parking Lot

I have often wondered, and just recently remembered, why I do not try to write poetry. I have all the requisite love of words, and the sense of the way they make music when put together just right. I have even been told my prose, even about such utilitarian matters as photovoltaic panels and lead-acid batteries, borders on the poetic . . . and, Thank you: I try. 

I took two courses at Harvard that showed me that I was a writer, but not a poet (at the level I would have needed to be, given my egotism.) Over a short intense weekend during which Robert Frost critiqued my work, and that of a lucky few others, I learned that ego in those not especially gifted is a disqualifying trait in a wannabe poet. I think we all did. The man, even in his last year, at 89, was at once awesome and humble. The word-music tumbled from him like water from a spring. (His parlor trick was to take a good line or two from a student poem and restate it with fewer words and possibly a rhyme thrown in.)

I then took a small seminar with Stephen Sandy, who was newly an instructor at Harvard. As an undergraduate, I had to compete to get in by submitting a poem. (That poem, thankfully, is lost.) Sandy was a gentleman, emphasis on those first two syllables, but his assessment of my work, and the way I saw it in the context of his just-published Stresses in the Peacable Kingdom as well, of course, as Yeats's and Frost's work, was enough to convince me that it's more than enough for me to appreciate poetry – I know it when I see it – without hurting myself trying to write it.