 Do You Mention You're A Poet?..(And if not, why not?) ______________________ types who either loll about on cots and write their doggerel, or who see fit to recline under perfect trees, quill pen at the ready to scribe rhyming couplets about "puffy clouds in a day with blue silk skies"- the air perfumed with a poet's scent of preciousness. Of course, it helps to have the teeniest touch of tuberculosis. (Think Merle Oberon wanting her last look at the heather in the movie Wuthering Heights.) There is the other extreme: lank, dirty-haired Bohemians who hop about on the stages of anti-establishment bistros, booming out free verse with subversive glee, and taking urine breaks in the alley behind the building: a building whose air is rendolent with the smell of burning hashish, cheap Zinfandel, and candles burning in the empty wine bottles, everyone wearing black. Tell people you're a poet, and most often you'll be tagged a nutcase, a mooning wannabe, a poseur and a fool. It's alright to say you're a 'writer' because a writer could be anything: a journalist, a compiler of book reviews, a scribbler for the newspapers- a solid sort. It's prestigious and sounds like it has some university vellum hanging off it, but tell the same people you're a poet and you're likely to garner looks of boredom, disbelief, or plain old condescension. Those who are unfamiliar with writing poetry do not know what to make of us. "Why do they do it?" they wonder- "What are they trying to prove? How can anyone think that is interesting; why sit for hours and scribble stuff down? It's not like a career for heaven's sake. Why do they do it?" I know I've been met with all these reactions and most of these questions, even unspoken- just look in their eyes; it's so familiar to me I've stopped telling people. For those of us who write, there is no explanation needed, and when in the company of those who don't, it's just not interesting to them- and for many of us, this includes family and close friends. My own mother still gets that glazed expression when she asks what I'm doing for the evening and I tell her, "writing poetry". They just don't get it and they never will. They'll never get that there are truckdrivers out there who carry a pen around to jot things down on napkins, or there are bank tellers, writing down thoughts alongside columns of numbers, and teachers who spend their breaks untangling some awkward metaphor- and that there are poets of all ages and walks of life who are only understood by other poets, and who are loathe to come right out and say, when asked what they do- "well I write poetry. Every chance I get. Because there's words in my blood like a poison-- or like flowers-- or like little rat things racing my nerves"- and a poet, and only another poet- would know exactly what they mean, and would not laugh. Main Page 
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