I am a poet

I would define art as any representative manipulation of a medium so as to intentionally stimulate an audience's emotions, intellect, impressions of aesthetic, or imagination. It's a very broad definition, but it's what I think is necessary in order to encompass the incredibly wide breadth of genres described as art. It includes illustration, painting, sculpture, music, photography, prose, poetry, theatrical performance and more things that I could possibly think to list.

Poetry is very dear to me, for it is the only art that I excel at. It seems pretentious to call one's self a poet, but I've reached a level of aptitude for the art that it would be a travesty to deny myself that prestigious title.

I am verbose, extravagant and intricate in my prose, because I adore language, and there is no more complicated, majestic, or brilliant usage of language than in poetry. Poetry is the pinnacle of language; it is the most that language could ever be. In more definite terms, it is the art of communicating the most information and feeling in the smallest space.

If I am pretentious for calling myself a poet then I am obscene for declaring that of all the tens of thousands of beginner poets on the internet, hardly ten percent of them are worth reading. That's not to denounce their writing as futile; they simply do not yet understand the mechanics of poetry, and it is only through very much bad writing and very much tedious reading will they begin to.

What I begin by telling a beginner is that there are very many "poetic techniques" that are available to them, that these are the essence of poetry, that without disciplined usage of any of them, their writing is indistinguishable from prose. Though it's true that some of the best poems don't rhyme, it's the simplest thing, I think, for a beginner to start at. It offers a gentle introduction to the music of language, to the forms of poetry, and those forms offer a beginner routes to branch into practicing meter, imagery, and other poetic techniques.

I don't think that someone can claim to be a poet until they've acclimated themselves to the music of language, to the types of rhymes, to alliterated verses, to onomatopoetic reflections of imagery in the sound of syllables, to the harshness of some words and the softness of others, to the rising and falling of pitch, to the metrical rhythms and to how those rhythms convey a mood and atmosphere. And of course, what would a poet be if they were not clever enough to devise the themes, ideas, imagery, symbolism and meanings that gave poetry purpose as an art?

My own poet development has reflected by stages an increasing awareness of the above elements. I started writing six and a half years ago. Since then I've written hundreds of poems and utilized every format. I have read poetry from Shakespeare, Poe, Frost, Goethe, Chaucer, Nietzsche, Dickinson, Thomas, Hughes, Twain, and countless writers like me. I've modeled the poetry in music, and I've studied literature on how to perform the art. I would have abandoned the art early on, for continual failure in it, if not for the occasional gem that shown through from beneath the muck. It was when an English teacher asked to read one of my poems at a school assembly, and when that poem was met with a standing, applauding audience that I resolved to continue and refine my practice of the art.

I am not without imperfection though. I go extended periods without writing at all. Despite that I can produce, from time to time, gems that are so beautiful that I can scarcely believe that I wrote them, it is still very hard to do. I may spend six to ten hours working on a single sonnet. That's an average of spending four to six minutes anguishing over each word. Every syllable is a stubborn puzzle. It's such a trial that I often wonder if even the "bad" poets wouldn't be able to produce works better than mine if they'd only spend as much time on them.

Anyway, there it is. When I am published and lay claim to a small but venerable following, I may look back on such rants as these and chuckle at my development.