Re: What is the job of a poet

Reading over your “What is the job of a poet”, I cannot help but feel a sense of reflection in your words. I myself am not much of a poet, though I do dabble in song-writing from time to time which some may protest is poetry in itself, but as a writer in general I have struggled with many of the things you outline in your piece.

I can’t help but create things, it's my natural human instinct to leave this world with more than what it had when I was born - a point I believe you make very clear. Writing is an outlet for me as well, for whatever emotion I may be feeling at the time as if I don’t pour out my feelings onto the page (or rather the screen many times) they will continue to be bottled up in my mind until the bottle threatens to explode from how crammed it is.

Writing, creating, connects us all together. We share our joy and our pain and pray that there is someone else out there who has felt the same. Again, this is our instinct as people to find community and cling to it with everything that we have until we are too weak to hold on any longer.

I aspire to one day rock people with my work as you describe in your first stanza. That is a writer’s job after all, to birth something from the muddled mess that they feel and experience and formulate it into something beautiful.

Beauty can be found in the most unlikely places.

- cfrestal