After years of denial, Merit O'Hare has finally come to terms with her inner poet.

The 18-year-old from McCandless with a penchant for creative writing had never read or written poetry until this year. She simply wasn't interested.

"I had this prejudice that poetry was old and boring," she said.

But a school poetry-writing assignment led first to a reversal of those attitudes, and then to national recognition.

Miss O'Hare, the novice poet, won in the teen category of the Borders Open-Door Poetry Contest with a work called "Jainism." A panel of authors, editors, and educators first reviewed the contest entries, and Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand selected the final winner.

The prize is to have Mr. Strand read the poem in a video clip on the Border's Web site, and inclusion in book of poems to be published by Borders.

Before the contest, Miss O'Hare had never read the work of Mark Strand.

"I'd heard his name once, but it wasn't until after he read my poem that I picked up his book and, obviously, it was amazing," she said.

Mr. Strand, former poet laureate of the United States and now an instructor at Columbia University, describes Miss O'Hare's work on the Border's Web site as "a terribly beautiful poem."

With imagery that Mr. Strand found surprisingly sophisticated, the poem describes transformations, illustrated by a dying spider.

"When things leave us they come back in different forms, everything comes back," she said.

A novice poet, she said she wrote "Jainism" in January, as her last assignment for a creative writing class taught by North Allegheny Senior High School English teacher Antonio Caruso. She'd taken the class to improve her fiction writing, but to Mr. Caruso's credit, gradually came to appreciate the insight offered by a carefully crafted poem.

"I never realized poetry was like looking at things from new angles," she said.

Although she'd written other poems for the class, none were very good, she said. This one, though, was different, and Miss O'Hare knew it immediately.

"It was something I could read over and over," she said, and even though she was the author of the poem, she could find new insights with each reading.

That was not the norm for the novice writer.

"I'm not really too sure about anything I write," she said. "Most of the things I write, I don't like them."

Poetry, she came to realize, was a creative outlet she'd been looking for.

"I think I was trying to write poetry when I was I was writing fiction," Miss O'Hare said.

A graduate of North Allegheny Senior High School, Miss O'Hare plans to major in biology at Dickinson College, possibly for a career in medicine. But she plans to supplement her class load with some poetry courses.

"I think it's something I'll always do," she said of poetry. "It's really cool. I love all aspects of it, reading and writing."

And now, Miss O'Hare is thinking of an alternative career: "I could end up being an English teacher," she said.