Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.
Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.
There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
Poets are like the decathletes of literature.
Some people are suspicious of others who have more than one talent. I've had poets tell me to my face that an actress can't be a poet.
Poetry has always been made to seem kind of cultish. But the truth is, everybody really loves it! It's much more mainstream than anyone thought.
The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.
I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.