Can I Call Myself a Poet?
With National Poetry Month arriving in the US and the words of many pouring emotion into pages across the globe every day, I find myself looking in the mirror and asking — am I a poet?
By defintion (according to the Oxford Dictionary) a poet is simply “a person who writes poems” with a poem being “a piece of writing in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by particular attention to diction”.
I’ve written more than a handful of poems over the last 10 years. Scattered across notepads and various online places are one-liners, tidbits and poems that have come to mind, occasionally at the most inopportune of times (bumpy car rides creating mazes of ink rather than legible thoughts). These writings tend to come at emotional times and entail myself trying to clarify and explore my feelings. Rhythm and rhyme are considered, word choice is adapted and a piece is completed. By definition that’s a poem which would make me a poet yet — am I a poet?
If a poem is written on a page and no-one is around to read it, does it express feeling?
Have other people read my poems? Has a poem of mine ever been published by a journal? Have I studied English literature? Do I know what a pentameter is?
The answer, wholly, is no. To which calling myself a poet conjures words like fraud, imposter and…
