Writers' conferences are gatherings held for those who would like to be writers, and they are taught by those who are already writers.

Would-be writers pay to go to such meetings for a variety of reasons: to talk to other would-be writers, to get someone else to read what they've written, to find agents and publishers to publish what they've written and, at least for some, for a good time.

The writers' conference I attended had all these components. A lot of would-be writers attended. A few professional writers came to "teach" classes, an even fewer number of agents and publishers showed up, and some attendees spent a large part of their time partying.

The conference was divided into sections: poets, nonfiction writers, fiction writers, screenwriters and playwrights.

Sections met daily. Now and then there was a kind of plenary session where everyone got together to listen to some published writer read his or her published writing.

Not unnaturally, since I was already a published prose writer and because I still considered myself a poet, I signed up for the poetry section.

I should have known.

There were more poets at the conference than in any other section. The poetry section was so large, in fact, it had to be divided into two sections. I was assigned to the second section. There, somewhat to my dismay, I found I was one of only two male poets—or, perhaps I should say, would-be poets. The rest of the group was all female and what I guess you would say wildly assorted.

The other male poet was an angry young man, or at least his poetry was angry. The women's poetry ran the gamut. One woman poet wrote of how she devoured her lover—a sort of a cannibal poet, I guess you'd call her.

Another, given to clothes of many colors, wrote poems of equal diversion, most of them in unintelligible English—or at least it was unintelligible to me.

A young woman poet, who also professed to be an actress, didn't write or read any poetry. She spent a lot of time partying, though, and showed up each morning of the conference intensely hung over. I never found out whether this condition led to any poetry.

Our "teachers" also were varied. One, a male with an eye for the young female poets in the group, had a book or two out and had been published in The New Yorker magazine, the ultimate measure of poetic success. The other, whom I would call a gifted amateur, had had some poems published here and there, but hadn't published any books yet.

We all got to read a couple of poems to the group. I did so with trepidation. That's because I was a kind of curiosity, a middle-aged man with a voice capable of putting audiences to sleep, who wrote poems that didn't deal with love or the environment and which rhymed. The other poets found this mildly amusing.

I also didn't party, so whatever happened out of class was a mystery to me, even if it wasn't to the rest of the group.

At the end of the meeting our poetry was "evaluated" by one of the professionals. My evaluator still didn't know what to make of a middle-aged man who wrote rhyming poetry. Finally, when I suggested that I wrote poetry about what I thought were the pivotal events in my life, she grabbed this straw and told me my poems were interesting "landmarks," even if they weren't really poetry.

The conference ended. I went home and stopped writing poetry.

I concluded I didn't have a cannibalistic view of love, that some poetry was poetry, even if it rhymed, and that I could write the landmarks of my life in prose rather than poetry.

The urge to resume my poetic career has never reemerged.

I've sometimes—but not often—pondered this. Perhaps it's because I don't suffer from depression, as did at least two modern American poets, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Perhaps it's because I am not an alcoholic gay man, as was Hart Crane, another American poet of note. Or maybe it's because I'm not so exclusively dedicated to poetry as Robert Frost, perhaps the most financially successful American poet of recent times.

Whatever it is I'm missing, I have concluded I'm not a poet and no amount of writers' conferences will make me one. It's not that I don't admire the poetry of others. It's just that I am not as equipped as they are.

It also may be that poetry is something you undertake when you're young and only admire when you're old.

Whatever the case, poetry remains one of our treasures. The organization of language into unique and memorable patterns is what makes poetry so wonderful.

And I think that's also what drives so many of us, including me, into trying to be poets. Somehow we want to get what's inside us out in the open in a way that will remain memorable, perhaps even ageless.

Maybe all of us need to try to be poets at some time or other in our lives, even if we never win the Pulitzer or Nobel prizes.

And I guess I am a living example.

Carl Heintze is frequent contributor to The Sun.