In May of 1990 a letter from The New Yorker magazine arrived in my mailbox. I had sent them “Dinner With The Babe,” my poem about a fantasy dinner with baseball legend and big eater Babe Ruth. It began as follows:
I’d serve a lot of hot dogs,
buns and beans and beer.
There’s never too much food around
when Mr. Ruth is here.
He’d come straight from the ballpark,
in uniform and cleats;
we’d talk about his batting stance,
and broads and booze and “eats.”
Naturally, having created such a rare work of nostalgic whimsy, I opened the letter expecting words of praise about my “playful surrealism” and “a marriage of art and life made in baseball heaven.” Instead, it read as follows:
The Poetry Department will be closed from May 31, 1990 through August 31, 1990. Only topical poems or those scheduled for imminent book publication will be considered during this time. All other manuscripts will be returned unread to the sender. Thanks for your cooperation.
And so began my journey as an unpaid, part-time poet. My early efforts were a mixed bag of pseudo-sensitive pablum, self-indulgent preening, and wordplay gone astray. Take, for instance, this short verse that abruptly dead-ended before hitting its stride:
Life is a mystery, love is a riddle,
hi diddle, ho diddle, hey diddle diddle.
The lesson is a hard one, but when you commit to a rhyming structure, you’ll likely have more losses than wins. In this case, once I used the word “riddle” in my poem, I pretty much unlocked the door to diddle. Similarly, I almost rhymed “Phoenix” with “Kleenex” in an unfinished poem but had to abandon the crusade after weeks of not showering or shaving.
Another pitfall for the aspiring (and sometimes perspiring) poet is the tendency to imitate their heroes. Witness this Dr. Seuss-like verse I wrote to my brother in anticipation of a visit from our mom:
Marge, you’ll find, is a good guest.
She will not say “my way is best.”
She will not squeeze your tube of Crest.
And if you feel you need some rest,
she will not make one more request.
Shameless mimicry aside, I increasingly found poetry to be a potent way to share genuine experiences with clarity, imagery and humanity. My feelings about the menace of a coming hurricane became a piece called “Blow Hard” which ended on a relatable up note about dodging disaster:
In the night it’s hard to slumber,
your house could be a pile of lumber.
You wonder why you’ve been forsaken,
fearing death or endless raking.
Then the danger peaks and passes,
you open doors and nothing crashes.
Slowly, you regain your nerve…
“Yeah, I knew the hurricane would swerve!”
One of the keys to a good poem, I discovered, is to be a storyteller who finds fresh ways to say routine things. The short-form framework of a Japanese haiku – 5 ,7 and 5 syllables on three lines – always got my cut-to-the-chase juices flowing:
Waking up early.
Time to think about the day.
First thought: Get more sleep.
Whistle while you work.
People will love to hear it.
Or they will slap you.
Meet you at midnight?
That’s way beyond my bedtime.
How’s six-thirty sound?
Your secret is safe.
I only told ten people.
They seldom gossip.
Having fun with words is always worth the ride, but the slipperiest slope in poetry may be the love poem. I found that out when I met my wife Sherry and proceeded to try way too hard to flaunt my sensitive nature. Observe:
Rooftop romantics leave no star unturned
for a stroke of luck in the moonlight.
I’ve paid my dues in Sinatra and self-pity,
unemployed heart, overworked and underfed.
Need I go on or is your gag-reflex fully engaged?
To this day, sometimes my poetry writing is a series of fits and starts that seems destined to fail in expressing anything of worth. You take words, you stick them together and you see if they convey any meaning – some of them do, some of them don’t. Then there comes a moment in my mind when I see and believe and the words that weren't there keep arriving, whole and true and right. That was the case when I wrote this verse in a poem for my wife:
Indulge me, dance after dance,
for I have loitered along the way,
forfeiting precious time in your arms.
And my atonement now is to love you
that
much
more.
It sums up my feelings perfectly. One might even say “poetically.” I don’t think I could write it any better. Unless, of course, I went for the rhyme:
Indulge me, dance after dance,
for I am wearing my best dancing pants.
Okay, not better as a rhyme. Moving on.
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