The Accidental Poet

I've loved words for as long as I can remember.
However, seven-year-old me (and eleven- and fifteen-year-old me) hated poetry.

Poets were other people. Poets were beret-wearing, coffee-drinking, guitar-playing mad hatters who wandered around reciting in rhyme and iambic pentameter. (English classes did not help this stereotype.) Poets were strange people with stranger ideas who typed exclusively in lowercase. I definitely didn't want to be a poet.

You might have deduced by now that I didn't fall in love with poetry by choice.

In my senior year of high school, I took a Writer's Craft course in which we were forced to write poetry, and was surprised to find that maybe I didn't hate it (with the exception of the ballad. I still can't write those to save my life). So I found myself doing more of it—for marks initially, but eventually just for the joy of capturing everyday beauty (and pain). And slowly but surely, I found that I, too, became a writer of poems. No, not a poet. Just someone who wrote poems.

But tonight while writing my not-love-poem (it's a work in progress. The working title is "This is Not a Love Poem"), I realized that I am so in love with the art form, and it dawned on me that perhaps I have possibly, unwittingly become an accidental poet.

I've never thought of myself as a poet until tonight, but the idea no longer feels so otherly. For the first time, the name of poet feels like it could be mine.

I think I kind of love it.