Charm City — Gerald Duff

In Charm City (a selection from the short story collection Fire Ants and Other Stories by Gerald Duff), a lonely divorced insurance salesman in Baltimore attends a poetry reading, decides he can do that sort of thing, too, and begins the process of looking for love at events where female poets read their productions aloud. He begins to write and is mistaken by one poet as a retired policeman who's found culture, a misapprehension the insurance salesman thinks it productive to allow her to maintain.