A Poet, by Any Other Name…

I suppose that it is a comfort to those whose computer systems depend on me to think of my verse as a hobby. “He dabbles in poetry,” they might say, and thus dismiss it as another of my eccentricities. I am infected to my soul, though. When “paper scraps are all I see/Of all the lies I told to me/Of all I saw and didn’t see/Of all I’m not/Or all I’ll be,” how can I consider my verse to be merely a hobby, my rhymes the result of casual dabbling?

It is difficult for me to believe that any great poet has a self-image that places secondary emphasis on “Poet.” Could the bard who wrote “Not marble, not the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;/But you shall shine more bright in these contents/Than unswept stone…” honestly have thought himself a playwright first? When Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote “Into the golden vessel of great song/Let us pour all our passion; breast to breast/Let other lovers lie” could she possibly have considered herself other than a poet, first and foremost?

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold…
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Once called by the poetic muse, a poet has little choice but to respond. Whether they find expression in the painfully crafted, artfully fitted lines of a highly structured sonnet, or pour forth in the jumbled hodgepodge of free verse, the discovered subtleties and complexities and connections of the poet’s world must find expression. If it truly is better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt, then poets have foolishness aplenty.

Being a poet does not mean writing cute ditties that rhyme. It is not simply being at home with obscure metaphor or deep symbolism. One is not a poet just because one’s doggerel has been published. No, being a poet is having a way of looking at life that emphasizes the hidden relationships among the things that make up our world. It is a disease, a compulsion to communicate, to experience the joy and agony of living and to inflict the impression of those feelings on one’s fellows. A poet’s eyes and ears, a poet’s sensitivities, are not left behind when entering the school or the workplace. Whether in the throes of actually writing, or experiencing the somewhat lesser cramps of constipation, working, watching, eating, reading, making love, the poetic process never stops.

I am a poet. My family is not proud. It took me years and many tears to realize that their dreams (and mine) of scientist, engineer, professional were subordinate to that one simple fact. But I cannot see life any other way.

I am a poet. Few among my acquaintances recognize that fact. If asked, they would likely say that I am a computer system designer, a student, or a writer. If pressed, one or two might mention that I am an “amateur poet,” a label I find somewhat less agreeable than the others. Those very few who know me well, however, would answer correctly, for regardless of what I might do to pay my bills or to distract me from the pain of life, poetry defines my existence.

It has been said that one is a writer when one is called a writer. By contrast, it seems that one is a poet when one is called to poetry. The call is subtle, but to those possessed with the ears of a poet, it is irresistible. It is there when you hear the splashing of a brook as it winds through a forested meadow, or the roar of automobiles on a desolate interstate highway. It is etched in the artistic lines on the face of an octogenarian and lurks subtly behind the marble skin of a fair youth. The feel of sun on skin calls, too, as does the grit of sand beneath fingernails. The call is embodied equally in the crashing waves on a seashore and a mound of cow dung. There can be beauty in a strip mine and ugliness in a rainbow; to the poet, this presents no paradox. To the poet, all the universe plays in the vast symphony, scents the air, flavors the stew, bathes the skin, and paints upon the canvas of life. And where the poet sees these contributions, the poet responds, and thereby adds himself to the sensory melange.

Why must I take this pen, again, in hand
Once more lamenting life with word and verse?
What demon hath this smoldering fire fanned
To force, from me, more fragments of my curse?
’Tis not for food, nor shelter, even hope
I squeeze these drops of thought onto this page;
Those are not strong enough to force me cope
With all this light and salt and love and rage.
When tears will come unbidden, they must fall;
Though sides might split with pain, yet still we laugh
These words simply must be; that is but all
I have for life: my bread, my eye, my staff.
  So it is I write what words I can.
  And so it is they make me what I am.

-- RonRisley - 04 Apr 1989