Who Is The Poet?

Poet: someone who composes poetry; a writer that is creative of thought, ideas, expression, imagination with the ability to articulate them into a poem or prose using meter, rhyme, lyrical expressions or any other poetic device.

My definition: A poet paints a picture not with brushes and paint but with words and emotions. Those words enable the reader to see in their mind’s eye scenery or gives them ability to feel the emotions or ideas being conveyed.

Most people have written poetry at least once in their life, whether it was a school assignment, a love note or writing on a restroom wall. For some writers it is easy, like swallowing cool clean water but for others is hard like downing that last bit of foamy hot beer from the bottom of the can. Poets can be inspired by everything they encounter for example other people, places, colors, and exact situations or made up ones. They can even imagine what it is like to be an inanimate object. Poems can be based on the present, past or future and any combination thereof. The poet can create with words a world of unlikely reality that will last a lifetime.

A poet writes from the heart and soul of life, using all that they have gleaned from their own life and the lives of others they have been witness to. Taking and forming words into lyrical living beings, with the hopes of enlightenment for others, to give them joy, peace, insight or to make them aware of injustice and all manner of differences among peoples of the world. Or could be the poet just is because they must be.

BUT please don’t mistake the poet/writer as the “speaker.” The speaker is the one telling the poem (the story) or from their point of view. This is sometimes hard to do, you know to separate the speaker from the poet because some poems are very personal. I say please don’t assume the poet and the speaker are one in the same and yet it is somewhat hard for me to describe a poet as a separate being from the poem, because you will never have one without the other. And without either the voice of expression of the world would be so greatly diminished that it would cry in an unknown sorrow, forever.

Who is the Poet

You,
you are the poet.
It is a duty,
a fate to sing to the world,
its own song.
With words that spill out
decorating by means of
fluid emotion, solid breath
liquid life, petrified evil,
frozen lust, glorified piety
sultry love or forbidden hate.
Providence has given this
Song to you, and me
the poet.
Yes even to me too.
I,
I am the poet.