Do we automatically become poets at birth? A blank canvas to apply muted colors of every memory, emotion, and a lifetime of experiences. Anyone could be an artist, musician, or poet. The poets are the lowest of the breed, holding the cultural ladder to the top of art. Before the takedown of a systematic indoctrination into societal norms and the culture at large with rules and regulations that govern the nonsensical nature of existence. Everyone has the capacity to create their personal masterpiece, if given half a chance. The tools of natural instincts and intuition are available for anyone.
These are the tools of any desire to express through language, visual imagery, or both. Technique and methodology be damned. A birthright slowly stripped away by the constraints of family, religion, government authority, and corporate control mechanisms. Beaten down by cultural constructs. The past is interfering with the present and messing up the future. There is no concrete context. The twit twaddle of incoherent babbling inside the mind's eye chattering on about this and blathering on about that hokey pokey nonsense of now, right here, which is nowhere. Inevitably, the poetry of art, life, love, and the pursuit of happiness exists. All of that drivel, in spite of a cruel, unfeeling place of contradiction where it dwells.
What is a poet? A charlatan character? A magician, actor, or some eccentric charming person who knows too much about too little. Consciously or unconsciously knowing everything about something concerning whatever it is. It’s fair game. A poetic license vanity plate on a car headed no place in particular, except the parameters of impossible destinations bordered by the unknown, next to the universal. Dead on arrival. The divine intervention of a human intersection that crosses over into the lines of infinite space in the written word. Lines printed upon a page of living text. A clean slate cannot be erased. We are all something. Poets. Why not?
If everyone were a poet, then there would be no need for poetry. Or is poetry an end in itself? Let’s leave that up to the imagination. The scholars and philosophers pontificate on. They have many clues, but zero definitive answers. Therein lies the dilemma: there aren’t many good poets, but there are plenty of bad critics. That holds true across the broader scope of the creators and destroyers of art, culture, and the spoken word. There are no hard rules to hold any content or information about the subject of poets. No site, page, or reference book can touch this topic without multiplying the confused chaos of existence in written form, like a book. There isn’t a Wikipedia page for poetry in the abstract sense. In any given imperfect world of grammatical errors and the syntax of intellectual freedom and curiosity, the poet resides somewhere between the word and the way it plays out. To convey ideas about the meaning of the message in so many words, the art of writing. Shakespeare had it in abundance, so many poet wannabes. Bob Dylan is a poet. Jesse Welles is too. So am I. So what?
A recent film documentary, Saved by the Beauty of the World, sheds light on the life and times of the poet Mary Oliver. Often misunderstood, she’s wrongly written off as a mediocre minor poet. There’s even less about her pursuits in the act of writing than most contemporary poets of her generation. Always the outsider looking in. The chain-smoking oddball who writes verses about the encroaching world. New ways to describe trees, flowers, rocks, living creatures, and other phenomenal things in the natural world’s unnatural ways, directly succinct in the mannerisms and uses of common everyday language.
One of the people that was interviewed in this Mary Oliver documentary is filmmaker John Waters. He befriended Mary Oliver in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They met in the 1960s at a local bookshop where he worked. Mary’s girlfriend Molly owned the bookstore. Waters is a bookworm. He obtained his offbeat informal education and twisted sense of humor from reading books and watching movies. But John Waters, the poet? Come on, totally out of character until now. Waters’s first published poem, titled “Catch,” appeared in the May 2026 issue of The Atlantic. A poem about playing catch, or not, with his father. I loved it. Being an avid hater of anything with a ball in it, or all sports in toto.
Catch
By John Waters
I never caught a ball.
Why would I?
Why do men need to be around balls?
(the rubber kind)
Are you more of a man if you throw a ball and less so if you catch one?
I do neither.
My father once tried to throw me a ball when I was a child
but
I just stood there.
No one has ever thrown a ball to me
since
or even considered it.
What would I do if I caught a ball?
I have nowhere to put it
I’d certainly never throw it back
Please
don’t ever throw me a ball
Here’s a unique man who’s practically done everything. Every wild, insane, cool, crazy, kooky little thing you could possibly conceive of and survived it all to be a honest to goodness poet. He once told me he loathed poetry. Or maybe he said poets One without the other is impossible. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a prerequisite for being a poet, or any other kind of creator, but I’ve always looked up to him as a role model. We share the same sentiments.