What's your role, as a poet, in the world?

The primary role of any serious poet is to make her readers think about language (and since language is by far the most important characteristic which separates humans from all other animals, to make her readers think about what it means to be human).

At present the world is full of people and organisations devoted to 'explaining' poetry. Advertisers, social scientists, teachers, arts councils, creative writing facilitators - all receive huge salaries for telling you what a poem means. (Telling you what a poem means protects you from needing to work that out for yourself, and hence shelters you from being exposed to poetry).

So in the first instance, every serious poet working at the moment needs to spend a substantial tranche of their energies exposing the lies, confusions, and conventional wisdoms of the Texas Education Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, Hollywood, Readers Digest, Erinys .....

Poetry asks difficult questions, teachers supply easy answers.

Being a poet is like trying to persuade McDonald's eaters to try organic locally-sourced food.

Doomed, but necessary.

I try to reveal how I process and interpret the world and the unworldly.

Poetry to me provides the vehicle for expressing the negative space surrounding everything, the parts between the lines we can't see, but we know are there.

If a picture paints a thousand words, then poetry is a thousand paintings.

The same poem read by different people will become different poems.

A poem can release so much feeling from so few words.

Something from nothing.

It is a bargain.

My role is to sell it.

I'm not sure I think of my life or my poetry as having a "role" in the world. I'm responsible for me and were it not for the fact that poetry is an addictive passion for me, I'd be following a different path. Poetry certainly has a place in the world, I''m not sure I can say the same for all of us.

I`m not really `A Poet` but poems have happened/ happen to me..a lot.

:) (:

`A Poet` is a role pro-scribed by others

to which some are gifted-ly suited to assume as their very own..Goood Luck and Love...been there - unexpectedly.

You know, this is a good question as it begs as to whether

the poet as influence has any...responsibilty to a `public`?

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I do not have an answer to that though Dinesh...I think it very relevant to ANY `role`.

I've always liked the answer that the late American poet Randall Jarrell gave: The role of the poet is to write poems.

I am not a poet, but like how they show how it should be done.

some say

"A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled

when the man became a poet." Eugene Field

To light up the world with rice paper poetry , To go where know poet has gone before ,

''Beyond the Galaxy'' over 400 billion stars thoroughgoing Jupiter and Mars .

....NOW...............

Beem me down Scotti so I can give the world my POETRY, avoiding those rookie mistakes I sometimes make ......

Not fifty shades of grey, fifty shades of pink the master-work of a great talented poet CAZZA guided by

'''''The intellect of the poets who post there poetry on YAP ..a Crap .

To integrate poetry as well as other creative endeavors into tratments for PTSD, especially those who served in the military during wartime.

To garner reaction.

to create a picture, mood, feeling that others might relate to