By Setarreh Massihzadegan
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

 Hearing the way lyrical haiku and free-verse poetry dance down her tongue, it’s difficult to believe that Beverly Peterson wasn’t always a full-time poet.

“When I retired, I decided I wanted to begin writing and improving,” Peterson recalls of her retirement from teaching in 1992. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I pick poetry and just see how much I can learn?’”

By way of classes, workshops, books, and plenty of practice, Peterson began to master the skill of poetry. This spring, she released a bound collection of her 100 best poems.

New skills
At the onset of her retirement and with her husband’s blessing, Peterson began writing her memoirs and working on her poetry. She adopted a diligent schedule of writing three hours a day, six days a week, and creating up to 50 drafts of each poem before she deemed it satisfactory.

“Every poem you write isn’t world-shaking,” she says. “You just hope it’s a little better than the last one you wrote.”

Peterson has written almost 1,900 poems, two-thirds of which she eventually threw away. Of those she kept, many have appeared in publications and the chap books she has put together and given away to friends and family.

Collecting words
Finally, Peterson went with the suggestion that she put her best poems in a book. “A couple of people said, ‘You have to put the best ones in a book. People aren’t going to read all 19 chap books,’” Peterson says.

The collection, titled Threads of Life, consists of eight sections, including Reflections, Early Years, Trying Times, and Aging with Hope. Each section reveals details and memories from various times in Peterson’s life—from her childhood in Waterville, Maine, to her move to Linden Ponds.

“It always gives me pleasure . . . coming up with an idea or a thought with a certain motion to it,” Peterson says. She trades ideas regularly through the poetry support group that she runs at Linden Ponds.