Cupid's Hired Bards

By Stephanie Simon

Feb. 14, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

AMES, Iowa —

The ambience is not ideal: The room smells of microwave popcorn. The decor is beige and floral, hotel-suite bland. The fluorescent lights buzz persistently. But -- amid the crusts of onion pizza -- romance is in the air.

Jim Coppoc taps out a lusty iambic pentameter with his thumb. Colin Rafferty chews his pen furiously, then scribbles a rhyme of sly seduction. Molly Jo Rose, pushing aside her greasy napkin, fills a pale-pink page with passionate longing -- for a man she’s never met.

They’re Cupids on commission, cranking out trembling confessions of ardor for five bucks, cash.

“Give your Valentine a gift from the heart this year,” their campus fliers read. They didn’t specify whose heart.

So these graduate students at Iowa State University -- aspiring writers, all -- have gathered in a lounge to scour their own souls for the sweet nothings that will make a professor’s wife swoon, a classmate’s boyfriend blush, a stranger’s fiancee melt.

“I can’t do this!” Ayana Rhodes wails. “I write angry political poetry, not love poems.”

But she buckles down to an order requesting a valentine from a young man to his girlfriend, an accomplished weaver: “When you thread your fingers through mine, / I am reminded of your braided hair,” she writes. “And I picture the first time we kissed, / lips moving over and under.”

She hopes it’s true.

The Writer’s Bloc mailed 26 such gems this year on behalf of tongue-tied romantics who see their whole world reflected in their sweethearts’ limpid eyes -- but have no idea how to say that without sounding cheesy.

There must be quite a few lovers in a similar fix. Web sites selling personalized stanzas and songs for $30 to $275 drew thousands of customers this valentine’s season, with men and women commissioning the odes in roughly equal measure.

Sweethearts ordered everything from brooding meditations to flowery couplets to hip-hop rap, earnestly passing on intimate details of their beloved (my husband falls asleep with his mouth open, my girlfriend has an uncommonly cute behind) in hopes of inspiring the rental poet to greatness.

The love poem, it appears, has been outsourced. MasterCard and Visa accepted.

The trend distresses Harryette Mullen, an acclaimed poet who teaches at UCLA. “We’ve been convinced only experts can do these things,” she says.

On the other hand, she adds, brightening: “If it helps poets pay the rent ...”

Most poets-for-hire welcome rent money. Yet they also believe they are performing a valuable service -- rescuing Valentine’s Day from the triteness of red roses and Russell Stover.

A number of books and Web sites offer advice on writing declarations of love, such as the 38 words that best set a mood of romance (try “delirious,” “velvet,” “voyage” and “temptation”). But the sad fact is, “most people don’t have the ability to write something that sounds good,” says Pat Veit, who sells hundreds of original verses through PoetryGifts.com.

That’s why Hallmark offers 1,700 valentine’s cards to choose from.

Men will spend an average of $126, and women $38, on standbys like dinner, a movie and flowers this Valentine’s Day. Among those looking for extra sizzle, commissioned poems are all the rage.

“It’s like going to a shoemaker to have your shoes repaired. This is something you want a professional to do,” says Sam Truitt, a published poet who sold several dozen valentine’s verses this year through SayLoveSay.com.

Turning your romance over to a stranger, however briefly, does have its pitfalls, of course. Iowa State professor Sheryl St. Germain was stunned last year when several secretaries in the English department congratulated her on her engagement the week after Valentine’s Day. It turned out the campus newspaper had printed the poem she commissioned for her significant other -- and the line about being leashed, a reference to her habit of walking dogs, had been rather misinterpreted. “They kind of over-analyzed the metaphor,” she says, ruefully.

Such peril aside, Truitt suggests that ordering a love poem is “classy,” in the tradition of medieval lords who hired minstrels to woo fair maidens with song. “You’re saying, ‘I went to the mat, I laid down the gold to have someone write a love poem for you.’ That says a lot about your love, don’t you think?” he asks.

Michel-Andre Bossy, a professor of comparative literature at Brown University, is not convinced.

“There’s a certain great poetry of passion, a poetry that has an erotic charge to it, and I think it would be pretty hard to get that for $29.95,” he says.

“Ultimately, it’s a little sad if you have to rely on someone else’s words to express your love. I’ve been tinged enough by romance to think the poetry ought to well up from within you.”

But that’s precisely why writing love poems is so intimidating. They’re supposed to spring from deep within an enraptured soul, born aloft by glorious passion unbounded. If you come up with a clunker, it does not look good.

So, even though she’s a graduate student in communications, Cynthia McClure, 36, decided she could use a little help this Valentine’s Day.

To express her love for her husband, Christopher, McClure usually makes him his favorite meal: lasagna and peanut-butter cookies. This year, though, she wanted to do something more. Christopher, an officer in the Army National Guard, has been sent out of state indefinitely on homeland security duty. Today is their first Valentine’s Day apart since they married in 1997.

A poem seems the perfect way to cuddle long-distance -- even if someone else has to write it. “It’s so romantic,” McClure says.

The graduate students struggle to meet her expectation, swigging Vanilla Coke to get them through a five-hour poetry-writing blitz. Last year, the group sold simple poems for $5 and sonnets for $8. The sonnets proved too much work. So this year, they have set a flat $5 rate for at least eight lines of verse, with most of the proceeds going to the campus literary journal. They won’t earn much but they have fun -- and relish the challenge.

Depending on which student grabs the commission, the poems turn out sober or sexy, passionate or goofy.

Jim Coppoc, brow furrowed, is finishing up a lighthearted poem, trying to work in that the woman who commissioned it considers her boyfriend a tiger in bed. He has already alluded to another of the couple’s favorite pastimes:

I think I’d never find a man like Boo

If I could search a thousand Iowa States

I think I’d never find another who

Can satisfy my lust for board-game dates.

Across the table, Colin Rafferty is desperately trying to work a valentine’s Nietzsche-inspired nickname into his meter. “What rhymes with Ubermensch?” he calls.

“Nihilist wench?” Coppoc suggests. Rafferty groans and buries that order form at the bottom of the stack.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” he says, “to come up with something that will make them happy. If you’re writing for your own girlfriend and she doesn’t like it, you can always say, ‘Here, I bought you some chocolates, and here are some flowers too.’ But with these, the poem is your one chance.”

Molly Jo Rose draws McClure’s order form toward her. It’s been left for last because it’s the hardest. The poem has to reflect the ache of absence. Then again, Rose doesn’t want it to be depressing. She comes up with a poem of loss and longing that concludes:

I’ll wake up on Friday

and make coffee for two

and all day

I’ll think of you

McClure reads the verse to her husband when he calls from his base in Michigan. Parts of it don’t quite fit -- like the bit about the remote-control gathering dust in his absence. “I don’t watch much TV,” Christopher McClure says.

Overall, though, he loves it. “I was blown away,” he says. “It really made me think about home. It made me realize how much she misses me.”

McClure plans to give her husband a copy of the poem when she visits next week. But she’s not willing to leave it to a stranger to set the mood for her trip. “I’ll whisper my own sweet nothings in his ear,” she says, a smile in her voice. Not all romance can be ghostwritten.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Love poems on demand

For Valentine’s Day, tongue-tied lovers can turn to the professionals. From the basic sentiments found in the local card store to a personalized romantic verse, here are some examples of what you pay -- and what you get:

Hallmark cards -- $2.99

Love is that certain strong feeling you get

For a certain incredible someone you’ve met,

A someone you’re certain you never could let

Out of your life or your heart.

Writer’s Bloc

(Iowa State University)

-- $5

funny what we find

when we are blind

with eyes shut to

everything but the