Calling Yourself a Poet: Why the Word Sticks in Your Throat
The word poet sticks in almost every poet's throat. A judge explains the license myth behind the flinch, what it quietly costs your drafts, and a script for saying it out loud.
At a wedding last spring, the man next to me asked what I do, and I listened to a woman across the table answer the same question from someone else. She ran marathons, she said, glowing, though she had never won one and never would. Nobody blinked. Ten minutes later the same question reached a quiet man in a gray jacket who, I happened to know, had been writing poems for twenty years, and he said, "Oh, nothing interesting. Insurance." The marathoner claimed her verb without a license. The poet hid his under the tablecloth. Calling yourself a poet is, for most of the poets I have judged and taught, the single hardest sentence in the language, harder than any line they will ever write. I want to take that flinch apart, because it is not humility. It is a misunderstanding with real costs, and it runs on a myth we can name.
Why Calling Yourself a Poet Feels Like a Lie
Notice the double standard the wedding table exposed. A runner is someone who runs. A gardener is someone who gardens. But somewhere along the way, poet stopped being treated as a verb-word and started being treated as a rank, something conferred by publication, prizes, or death, preferably all three. Under that logic, saying "I am a poet" does not describe your Tuesday nights. It claims a medal. And since no one handed you a medal, the sentence feels like fraud coming up your throat.
The rank theory collapses the moment you look at the actual history. Emily Dickinson saw fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems in print during her lifetime, most of those altered by editors without her consent. By the medal standard, Dickinson spent her whole life not-a-poet and became one posthumously, which is obviously absurd. She was a poet on every one of those unpublished afternoons, because a poet is a person engaged in the practice, not a person holding the receipt.
Poet is not a rank someone awards you. It is a direction you are facing.
The License Myth
Here is the myth, stated plainly so you can see how strange it is: somewhere there exists an office that certifies poets, and until it stamps you, the word is not yours. Poets who would never say this out loud still obey it. They wait, and the waiting has stages I can recite from years of listening to entrants:
- "Once something gets accepted, then I can say it."
- "Once somewhere pays me, then it counts."
- "Once there is a book with a spine, then it is official."
- "Once someone who did not birth me calls me a poet first."
I can report from inside the contest world that the goalposts never stop walking. I have exchanged emails with poets who have won money for their work and still write "I dabble in poetry" in their bios. The license was never going to arrive because the office does not exist. There is no gatekeeper. There is only the practice, and you are either in it or not.
What does exist, and what I think the flinch is really guarding against, is the follow-up question. Say "I am a poet" and someone will ask, "Published anywhere?" The dread of that moment makes people surrender the word in advance. But look at what the question actually is: a stranger asking about distribution, not about identity. "Are you published" relates to "are you a poet" the way "do you sell your tomatoes" relates to "do you garden." It is a fine question. It is just not the same question.
The Dentist Who Made Me Practice What I Preach
My own reckoning came in a dentist's chair, of all places. Small talk before the drill: what do you do? I had judged hundreds of contest entries that year, published for two decades, and I heard myself say, "I work in publishing." Not false. Profoundly evasive. The hygienist, prepping instruments, said without looking up, "I write poems. Terrible ones, probably. But every Sunday." She said it the way you would say you play tennis. No apology, no resume attached, and then she asked if I wanted the mint polish.
I thought about her for weeks. She had an amateur's schedule and a professional's relationship to the word, and I had the opposite, and hers was better. The next time a stranger asked, I said, "I am a poet and an editor," and the ceiling did not fall. The stranger said, "Huh. What kind of poems?" which turned out to be a conversation worth having.
What the Flinch Costs Your Poems
If this were only about dinner parties I would leave it alone, but I see the flinch on the page constantly, and this is where the judge in me gets involved. A poet who cannot claim the word writes like a guest in their own poem: apologetic openings, hedged images, endings that curtsy instead of land. Self-permission is a craft variable. Watch it work. Here is the unclaimed version of a stanza, the kind I score every month:
These are just some thoughts I had at my father's grave,
I'm not sure they mean anything to anyone but me.
The poem is apologizing before it has even started, asking the reader for a hall pass. Now the claimed version, same occasion:
I brought a folding chair to my father's grave
and sat like a man waiting for a bus
he knew was not in service anymore.
I stayed until the cold made its point.
No permission requested, and so none is needed. The chair, the bus, the cold: a poet is simply at work. The distance between those two drafts is not talent. It is the speaker's belief in their own right to be speaking, and that belief begins, in my experience, off the page, in small spoken sentences like the one the hygienist managed. The craft name for this quality is voice, and no revision technique supplies it if you have privately decided you are trespassing.
The Five-Sentence Script for the Next Party
Enough theory. You need working language for the moment the question comes, so here is the script I now give every poet I mentor. Practice it out loud once; it holds up under real conditions.
- Say the word first and plainly. "I write poetry." If you are employed elsewhere, stack it without ranking it: "I teach third grade and I write poetry." The word goes in the sentence, not in a blush after it.
- Answer the publication question with the truth and no apology. "Not yet, I am still sending work out," or "A few places, yes." Seven words maximum. Apology adds nothing except an invitation to pity.
- Have one concrete detail ready. People go blank at abstractions and warm to specifics. "Lately I keep writing about my grandmother's sewing machine" beats any statement about your themes. Watch them lean in.
- Ask them something real. "What was the last poem you actually liked?" Half will say something from school, and now you are having a conversation instead of an audit.
- Let the silence be theirs. If someone smirks or says "can you make money doing that," you are not obligated to defend the entire art form at a barbecue. "Almost nobody can, that is not why I do it" ends the exam. Their discomfort with the word is not your cargo.
Earning It Backwards
One objection deserves a straight answer: doesn't the word have to be earned? Yes, and here is the twist, you earn it backwards. The claim comes first and the work ratifies it, the same way a person becomes a runner by running badly on cold mornings, not by waiting for a podium. What earning looks like in practice is unglamorous and completely available: you write regularly, you read poets better than you, you revise, and you put work where it can be judged by people who do not love you. That last one matters most, and it is the cheapest confidence purchase I know. Poets who enter our monthly contest get back a score across five criteria, creativity, emotion, structure, language, theme, from readers in a community spanning more than fifty countries, and I have watched a single scored entry do more for a poet's right to the word than years of private scribbling. Sending one poem to a real judgment is a way of telling yourself the practice is real. The certificate that comes with it does not make you a poet. The sending already did.
The Word Is a Door, Not a Trophy
The gray-jacketed man from the wedding mailed me a poem a few months later, a good one, about his daughter learning to whistle. In the note he wrote, "You are the first person I have told." That sentence broke my heart a little, twenty years of Tuesday nights and no one knew, and it also confirmed everything I believe about this: the word he could not say at the table had been the lock on the drawer where the poems lived. Calling yourself a poet is not a boast waiting to be checked. It is the small spoken act that lets the work into the daylight, where readers, editors, and the occasional judge can finally do their part. Say it at the next table. Badly, quietly, with a dry mouth if necessary. Then go home and be one, which was always the only license on offer.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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