By Elena Boryczka 

Huddled around a table with poems and books at the ready, the 10 or so attendees of the August meeting focused on the rhythm of the words. Each person was given the opportunity to read — either his or her own work or something by another author — and all readings were greeted with a warm round of applause.

As Louis Haga, one of the anchor members of the group, put it: “I don’t think any of us take ourselves too seriously.”

“We like poems; we like to read them, talk about them, write them,” he said. “I write poetry because it makes me a more careful reader. I’m not waiting to be discovered … It’s simply something that I like.”

Haga said Voices in Verse has been meeting on the fourth Saturday of the month for at least the past six years, and while most of the time they fly under people’s radar, a core group has kept the group alive.

“We’re not a large group; only rarely do as many as a dozen people show up. Some particularly talented people attend when their schedules permit. Four of us, all old men, have nearly perfect attendance,” Haga said. “We might be called, with apologies to Robin Williams, the Nearly Dead Poets Society.

“While none of us takes him [or] herself too seriously, we are serious about our appreciation of and respect for poems: those we write, those we read and those we talk about. We will, on occasion, discuss each other’s contribution, but we seem to studiously avoid criticizing each other’s poems.”

Fred Melden is one of the other men who regularly attends Voices in Verse, first being introduced by fellow poet and group member Joe Schrader more than a year ago. Melden, who cites Poe and Tennyson among his favorite poets, said the subtle differences between this group and other literary groups are one of the reasons he keeps coming back each month.

“[Voices in Verse] is different than most other groups in its non-performance format,” he said. “One recites sitting instead of standing, and we have the guidance of a mentor with extensive literary knowledge and scholastic background. Louis Haga almost always introduces us to some new aspect of poetry at each meeting.”

Melden read two of his poems at the Aug. 24 meeting, and he later said his writing process is one of constant revision and building.

“I’m a detail-oriented writer. I tend to write from a line or two that spontaneously comes to me, and from that I build a poem toward what I think will be the destination — a theme, idea or commentary,” he said. “Along the way I revise and edit repeatedly, and the poem then leads me to unexpected ideas. All this revising and editing requires a lot of time. A typical poem takes me a week or more to write, and I work on them constantly.”

For Haga, poetry turned into a passion when, as a second grader nearly 70 years ago, he was required to memorize the first stanza of a poem called, “The Moon’s the North Wind’s Cookie.”

“And I think that hooked me for life,” he said.

He said he contained his enthusiasm in high school (“Because at that age it was important to contain enthusiasm for anything, especially something as important as poetry”), but the rest of Haga’s life has been infused with poems and poets of all kinds.

“Among the Latin poets, I have long believed that Horace is nearly Virgil’s equal, though I have come to value Horace less in recent years. Chaucer will always be great. I like John Donne and Alexander Pope, even though it’s been unwise to acknowledge an affection for either Pope or Dryden for the past hundred years,” he said. “All of the ‘greats’ in the tradition or American and English poetry wrote at least some fine poems and deserve to be read over and over. Among the twentieth-century poets, I like Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Among contemporaries, I like John Ashbery, Louise Gluck, and Frank Bidart.”

For Melden, poetry has had a big impact on his life, not only helping shape the way he thinks but also with the people he has been exposed to.

“First, I’ve met a lot of interesting people — much more interesting than most people,” he said. “Second, the practice of writing has deepened my love of language, and the writing process … becomes one of self-discovery. I learn of ideas and imaginings I didn’t know were within me. Art in general is not an outlet but a means of developing a part of the self too neglected in our task-driven world.”

Updated September 7, 2007