I can vomit up limericks in realtime. That doesn't make me a poet.

I mean, except it does, if you want to call it poetry and call yourself a poet. Literally anything falls under the umbrella of "poetry" today. Prose poems? Shit. Those are just paragraphs. Spoken word and slam poetry? I don't like that format, but arguably it's poetry.

I think one of the big hang ups people tend to have with poetry is that they think because it's art, it should be hard. Becoming a good painter or drawer? That's hard. You gotta develop good spacial reasoning, appreciation for colors, etc. Becoming a good sculpture? That's hard. You gotta have a good understanding of the materials you're working with, patience. Etc.

Poetry? Poetry is easy. The amount of time and effort to go from being a bad poet to a passable poet to a decent poet is very small. That's because it's two core parts are language and analyzing the world. We literally embrace both those concepts day in and day out. We're so immersed in language that it is a core part of our thought process. We're so analytical about the world and we don't even know it, that we hire people to analyze the world for us. Traffic and weather patterns, stock prices, people who research chemistry and physics and outer space, on and on and on. We're curious, driven creatures who use language to express the world around us and our roles in it. There's no mystery. It's like walking. That's a huge reason why poetry is often used in therapy.

Poetry, more than any other art, is the domain of 'fuck you, because we said so.'

That's elitism in general. A huge part of life is catching a lucky break and then spending half your time afterwards justifying why you deserved that lucky break. Can the system be gamed? Somewhat. Are there politics and unwritten, unspoken rules about the whole thing? Yeah. But that's true about almost every major aspect in our lives from dating and relationships to job hunting and careers.

As with almost every other thing, the people who are in power tend to be in power partly because they're lucky, and at their core they realize it and they realize that their grasp on their power is tenuous at best, so they become dicks, to cut back on the competition, for fear of losing their power. So they create social circles and they create rules and they create elitism, because they want to hold onto what they have.

What's lost to the history of the world is millions of creative people, from writers, artists, and musicians, to discoverers, inventors, and philosophers, who we will never hear about because they weren't in the right place at the right time. That's alright though, because so much is loss to time. What's important though is that those people took it upon themselves to explore the world, to explore themselves, and to create, and to find a way to connect with others in the process, thereby discovering their personal humanity and in the process enriching mankind's humanity. But don't take my word for it . . .

"Art is about discovering your style and connecting with people who appreciate it."