Are You a Poet?

A complete stranger recently asked me, in the middle of a fundraising meeting, "Are you a poet?" "E-excuse me?" I stammered back, unsure if I'd heard her correctly. "I wonder if you're a poet; you look like one." While I was pondering whether she meant I look like a poet she knows, or if I simply have the air of a poet, someone else answered cheerily, "Well, of course she is!" Everyone in the room chuckled, including me, but the metaphysical implications of the question have been nipping at my heels ever since.

True, in concrete terms, I was poet laureate of my high school class and even won a few awards in college. Then I put aside my sophomoric efforts in pursuit of more serious endeavors, like getting a paying job. The highlight of my poetry-writing career came several years later, though, when a friend-of-a-friend at a party I was throwing came across an unfinished poem I'd scratched out on a scrap of cardboard and hastily stuck in a bookshelf. I watched his face go from a jovial grin to something like, well, profound recognition. He pressed it against his chest and stuck it back where he'd found it. I felt hotly embarrassed, a voyeur in my own home, until it suddenly struck me that I'd done my work: a poem is supposed to speak to the heart.

Intrinsically, "Are you a poet?" isn't a question of title or position, it's a question about how you perceive things. Are YOU a poet? ARE you? What do you see around you? Can you see beauty in the ugly and mundane? Could your sadness be a song? Is there ecstasy in the everyday? There's poetry in numbers, the poetry of food, the epics of human touch, the dirty, disambiguated poetry of the streets, the sublime sonnets of nature; there's even something poetic about the laundry, the fragrance and the folds of it... How you interpret the world around you means the difference between loving life, or just living it. By that right, yes, I hope I am a poet. And I hope you are, too.