From time to time, a familiar question turns up in the morning mail. College students and cub reporters ask: How can I learn to write “the good stuff”? There’s no easy answer, but here are some suggestions: Learn to look intently, read insatiably, and write incessantly. Under that final heading, consider this further tip: Try your hand at verse.

Not poetry. Unless you’re a Dylan Thomas, who was poetry’s precocious Mozart, it will be a long time before you write poetry. Verse is something else. Merriam-Webster defines verse as “metrical writing distinguished from poetry especially by its lower level of intensity.” The American Heritage dictionary adds snootily – and mistakenly – that verse is metrical writing “that lacks depth or artistic merit.”

That stupid comment betrays a colossal ignorance of both poetry and verse. The spheres overlap. There is more “artistic merit” in the poems of Mehitabel the Cat than in some of the cantos of Ezra Pound. A quatrain from A.E. Housman may provide more “depth” than a sonnet by Shakespeare. I digress.

Notice that both dictionaries define verse in part as “metrical writing.” It is not necessary to master the distinction between a duckbilled dactyl and an antiseptic anapest. We may improve the quality of our everyday writing by listening to the way in which it reads aloud. Does it stumble? Does it stride? Often we can lift a sentence above the pedestrian level by replacing a one-syllable word with a two-syllable word. Or vice versa.

We can practice this discipline by so simple an exercise as the writing of limericks.

“I sat by the duchess at tea./Indeed we sat knee to knee./Her rumblings abdominal/Were simply abominable/And everyone thought it was me!”

If the erring grammar offends you, please shift the limerick to the bishop of Skye, who feasted on hot mutton pie, etc., etc. When we fiddle with verse, we hone our sense of cadence. We learn to make every word count.

If we hope to write above the pedestrian level, we must learn to look intently at the world around us. Images form. Some years ago a feature writer for Scripps-Howard interviewed a centenarian poet, Margaret Williamson of Memphis. She wrote of things she had loved:

“I love the battered silver on a train,

The bridge rails as they seem to pass me by,

The peeps I hear while walking in the rain,

Red hawks sailing that rarely flap to fly.”

An Oregon poet, David Hedges, recently contributed a sonnet to Lyric, the 93-year-old quarterly for those who love both poetry and verse. He wrote of dawn at Benson Pond, where “fry and minnows work/the velvet undersides of sunken logs/And turtles, snakes, and salamanders lurk./Teeming finches, darting, tease the weeds/and set the cattails swaying like batons./A flock of wood ducks startles and stampedes./The flutter raises trumpets from the swans …”

The thing is, Hedges had looked intently at sunken logs, finches and cattails. He had banked the images, and when it came time to write his sonnet, there they were, just waiting for him.

Take the plunge, you writers! Write limericks, or quatrains, or sonnets, or rondos, or blank verse. Flee the temptations of free verse. As Robert Frost remarked, writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. Waste some time on lines that rhyme – but let me ask on bended knee, pray do not try your lines on me!

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.

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