There's something special to be said about all of the men and women that become poets. Writers in general look at the world with a very, well, let's say, romanticized view--we see the beauty in things that some people will never even have the willingness to notice.
Poets in particular are more susceptible to this. We stop while we're driving, and pull over because we see a large tree that captivates the area around it. Photographers have this sense as well, and they will try to capture the image of the tree - but poets? Poets will try to capture what the tree is doing; they will tell you how the leaves dance across the branches and the way the tree occupies it's space through symbols of solitude and power.
This article is a little misleading, as it's titled "Why I Became a Poet" but really, this is more about why I am never going to not be a poet. I had my first poem published when I was in third grade (okay, it was by my local newspaper, nothing special) and at the time, I didn't really even know what poetry was. I am a poet because the world around me begs me to tell it's stories.
For me, being a poet is about a lot more than just bringing words to paper - it's knowing that each and every aspect of a sentence is its own artistic being and able to be interpreted in whichever way the reader wishes to see it. When you write a poem, you are not writing one story, you're writing something that people can choose to read in any which way that most affects them. Every poem has a limitless number of interpretations, if written correctly.
I "became" a poet because I wanted to manipulate words and I found beauty in even the simplest of things - like the period that ends a paragraph, or the way the letters on my keyboard have slowly faded into small pits for the oil from my fingertips. Everything in the world is already a poem, waiting to be rewritten again, or turned into something new and even more exciting than the first time.
I became a poet because there is a person who exists who likely wrote the first poem, and everything after that has been a whirlwind of manipulating language, turning words into art, spilling ink onto paper into a deliberately incorrect fashion, and we have never been better for it. I became a poet because there is a specific art in poetry that for some of us, it will always be and has always been as much of a part of us as our ability to read and write, or in some cases, in our ability just to see the world around us for more than what it really is.
