With All Due Respect

I hope there is never a baseline skill for being named "poet."

In other words, there should never be something external to the poem that makes your work "poetry" or not.

If being able to write a "formal" haiku or a limerick successfully, say, were the baseline skill -- Jack Kerouac would never have made the grade. As best I can recall, his many haikus did not fit any formal scheme -- they were what they were (and are). That's all that's ever needed.

There are lots of self-described "poets" out there. Like any similar self-description, they are made to give the describers a sense of self-importance they usually have not earned.

I like the definition I heard in Poetry 101 back in college: if someone whose opinion others respect calls something you wrote a poem, then you're a poet.

What that means, in effect, is that the work is what matters -- to you and to them. The label given to you for having written it is simply a means of identification -- a sonnet by Donne, an elegy by Tennyson, a haiku by Kerouac.

Your ability to write three balanced sentences in iambic pentameter that rhyme ABAB followed by a heroic couplet, for instance, does not necessarily make you a poet. It's something intrinsic, something at the core of such a work, that makes a given poem a sonnet. The form just reflects that essential fact. (And reflections can be very important!)

When you write one, someone else who loves sonnets (or elegies or haikus or whatever) is bound to notice, someday. If that person then calls you a poet, I think you can consider your dues paid.

P.S.: This post doesn't sound much like what I promised "next time" -- have patience. It serves as some necessary background. IMHO, baselines are vital -- just not in determining who's a poet! Or maybe, I just set one ... ?