Poet, n. : A Word Too Big for One Definition

I don’t know what it means. Maybe it’s for the best.

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I’m always enthusiastic when learning about other people’s hobbies. Hobbies make for the best conversations — they can stay light and casual or dive deep into something personal.

But there was one time when I just didn’t know how to react. A guy from my office, when I asked about his hobbies, simply said:

“I’m a poet.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly. It wasn’t “I like writing poems”, which would have been straightforward. He didn’t say “I enjoy writing” or even “I love poetry”, which would have made sense.

No, he chose poet, a word that stands on its own, weighty and undefined.

How come that the word poetry is quite clear, but the word poet so mysterious ? It’s probably because we generally assume that being a poet isn’t just a matter of word technique. A good illustration for this would be AI. ChatGPT is perfectly able to write poems. Here is one I asked him to write for the sake of the example:

The page is silent, blank and wide,
A sea unshaken by the tide.
Yet here I sit, with pen in hand,
To carve a world, to trace the sand.

The ink runs fast, it weaves, it hums,
A voice from where the silence…