by Scott Wiggerman

Before I was a poet, I was a gardener. Each spring, summer and fall, I planted, nurtured and harvested a wide assortment of vegetables. Most seasons, I ended up with more tomatoes, peppers, onions and, of course, zucchini than I knew what to do with. Luckily, I was also a cook who relished homemade sauces.

But the vegetables proved to be just part of the joy of gardening. Little did I realize how much creativity they would inspire. While I had dabbled with poetry on and off since high school, I certainly didn't think of myself as a poet. But about eight years ago, in my late thirties, amidst the asparagus and beets, green beans and peas, I unexpectedly found not only an inspired subject but also a voice.

Who knows what finally catapults mere contemplation into an act of creativity? After a bout of weeding or watering, I suddenly found myself with a pen in hand, thinking about the garden in an imaginative manner. Asparagus became "a sea of charmed snakes"; zucchini were "adolescents out of control"; tomatoes were "juicy trollops." It seemed that once I got going, the ideas kept coming. The care of the garden stimulated and spawned ideas through a creative cross-pollination daily.

When I had a couple dozen vegetable poems, I realized that I was no longer writing just for myself. I'd reached the scariest point of the whole creative process: deciding that my writing needed to come out of the closet. That summer, I joined a poetry critique group, sent out a handful of poems to journals and read my poems in public for the first time. These were enormous steps for me to take but necessary to my newfound avocation.

To varying degrees, all three steps validated what I was doing with my poetry. The critique group has probably been the most helpful; in fact, I'd go so far as to say it's been indispensable to my growth as a poet. As someone who only had shared his poems with a handful of close friends, it was daunting to attend a group of complete strangers whose main purpose was to criticize! Yet I grew comfortable with the group (many of whom have become good friends), and I learned much about editing, revision and craft from these poets. And I still do, rarely missing one of the biweekly sessions of the Poetry Critique Group of the Writers' League of Texas.

Based largely on the encouragement I received from the group, I started to submit my poems for publication, another huge step in my progression as a writer. I began by submitting to local journals, and even after all these years, I shy away from the behemoths (New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, etc.). Much to my surprise and delight, several of my vegetable poems were accepted for the beautiful, but now-defunct journal, Ma-ana. This initial success prompted me to send poems to larger and more distant publications, and despite a great number of rejections, which I accept as part of the territory, I can say that now I'm happily published in dozens of journals as well as several poetry anthologies.

By far, the hardest step was making myself read in public. I began by venturing out to poetry readings as a listener. Even the anticipation of reading made me nervous. Finally, one evening, I decided to take the plunge. I took the stage at an open mike in front of a swarm of mostly younger strangers at a long-gone coffeehouse on Congress. Literally shaking, I read three poems, in retrospect, probably rather poorly. Yet the applause was polite, and several people came up to me afterwards, encouraging me to return. I did, and each time I did, reading became easier and more natural.

Success as a poet was not easy, but like gardening, poetry developed into more than a hobby. When I think about it, gardening and writing poetry are actually quite a bit alike. Both are introspective activities, requiring hours of observation and discipline. Both require diligence and patience, vision and effort. Both quietly bring forth fruit from the smallest germ, producing sustenance, if not for the body, then for the soul. I am proud to say that I unabashedly identify myself not as a gardener who writes poetry but as a poet who gardens. With both, as I proclaim in the first poem of my book, Vegetables and Other Relationships, "I beam like I've delivered a world."

[Vegetables and Other Relationships is available in local bookstores and online at Scott Wiggerman's website, http://swig.tripod.com.]