It rides the banner of this blog: of poets & processors, and yet my definition has proven a bit enigmatic. Consider this post a first attempt to remedy that.

I am no poet, not in the strictest sense of the term.  I have a friend (one who may or may not stumble across this site and read this—hi!) who is a poet, who writes poems, and who stands on a stage with some regularity and recites said poems to a real audience made up of human listeners eager for the evoked emotions that flow through the careful jumbles of words and syllabic mystery I often feel is at the core of what makes a good poem.

Again. I am no poet.

But I use the term as a catchall for something bigger: the evoking of emotion through the human act of communal communication, of art, of form of music, of the very soul of storytelling.

Humans have used stories and language and words for the literal duration of our history: “Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories.”^[1] 

We have countless words to describe this human side of what we do with and for each other, but I think a poet might describe it all as an extension of poetry. I think.

It felt right. It felt human. It felt like a word that goes deeper than a form or a format, or the act of stringing words together into a meaning culled from deep within the depths of our unknowable souls. 

We are all poets of a sort.