What if all you wanted to do was write poetry?

Imagine there’s this rich girl. Say she’s the daughter of one of these latter day Data Barons we keep hearing about. In older parlance you might have called her an heiress to an unimaginably huge family fortune. But there’s more: she’s beautiful, of course, wears beautiful clothes and possesses all the grace of a cat-walk model. She can have anything she wants but, get this: all she wants is to write poetry.

So what? She can write her little poems, then use her influence, her money to get them published – because publishing’s impossible without some sort of influence – I mean even if you can write, right? And if the stuffy poetry establishment are alone in being resistant to her charms, she can buy her own publishing house, print her own poems, have them distributed far and wide, and pay other rich and famous people to say nice things about them. Or people might hail her as a genius anyway, because she’s wealthy and beautiful, and everyone always says nice things to rich and beautiful people, because they want her fall in love with them and shower them with her money and favours in return.

The trouble is she’s a serious poet, and she knows getting published isn’t the whole story. It’s being taken seriously that’s the problem. So you can see the bind she’s in. She can’t help being born who she is. She can’t help her looks, her manners, her money, and she knows the best poetry isn’t born out of luxury anyway. It’s born out of struggle, out of darkness, out of poverty. So what she really wants to do is escape the money and the hangers on, and the false smiles and the parties and the exotic travel and the razzle dazzle, and just sit down somewhere quiet and write.

But when I say she’s a serious poet, I don’t mean she’s a good one – however these things are measured. She’s somewhere around the middle. A middling poet, let’s say, but one who takes her art seriously and is sincere in what she writes. Like anyone else who tries it, sometimes the muse comes through clear as a bell with flashes of brilliance and genuine insight. But even after penning the duff stuff, she can feel it bringing about a change in her, deepening her and she’s discovered all that seems to matter is having the time and the space to write it.

Perhaps she’s ill, or worse: perhaps if she doesn’t escape to write somehow, she’s going to be really ill.

So she runs away, hides herself in a big city, volunteers her time in a charity shop, rents a little flat over the top, begins to write. Everyone thinks she’s been kidnapped, or worse. Her father’s private security people and the press go mental. She’s also not been very skilful in covering her tracks, so they find her, drag her back to normality, incarcerate her in wall to wall psychotherapy and suitable boyfriends. She goes along with it, for a time, but only while she hatches a better plan, a better shot at obscurity.

Next time she’ll go to ground properly.

She’s read all the spy novels and knows how to do it now. She’ll buy a houseboat, putter up and down the canals, draw a modest income from a bank account no one knows about. She’ll give herself an arty pen-name, and use Createspace or some-such to get her books bound and printed, because she likes the feel of her poems in a book – no more than a dozen copies though, and she’ll give them to charity bookshops as a way of launching them into the world. No one will ever know who she is, or what’s happened to her.

Well, what would you do, if you were in her place, and all you wanted to do was write poetry, if all you wanted to do was grow some soul?

Does she stand a chance, do you think?