**SOMETIMES, I REGRET BEING A POET...**

When I say I have regrets as a poet, I'm not trying to be exaggerative, poetic or dramatic. I'm only trying to be frank and be human, for once. This is not necessarily about those nights when you want to write but words are on a vacation, almost everyone experiences block due to their varying source of muse. And a few of the writers have an immunity towards the block - perhaps, the few of us are the clique who believes muse is a fast sinking mirage. However, this is not my centre of concentration for this writing.

Charles Bukowski is among the greatest poets that ever lived. This he acclaimed was an offshoot of the fact that he care less about people's opinions about him. Poets are one of those few gifted people who are young at hearts, so the grey hairs doesn't readily count in the enclave of art. Perhaps, this is one of those legit reasons why poets are seen as being immortal. And this in turn creates a feeling of an ethereal being in the mind of the 'poet' but if we can overlook the immortal indemni for a while, maybe we would come to realise that the society expects too much from the young poet in the cycle of his young existence. And when you don't meet up to their level of expectations, you are considered as being a megalomaniac.

In the same light, the poets of the past ages were highly revered, seen as prophets of their hours and hence, poetry - of nobility. But the poetry of this modern hour seems to have lost its nobility - the revered prophets who have the instruments to ignite a change are falling low of this not because thru don't know how to but because, they ain't doing it right. An African proverb goes that : "he who will clothe one would firstly be judged by his own dressing". A disorganised, flooded clime of poetry where everyone is at war with the other simply because he needs to be at the top, he needs to be the superior, he needs to have that power which must not be contended with - the poet's king. What we seem to ignore is the fact that a craft that has no mastery can't have a sole leader. Perhaps, this is one of the inspiration for my piece : POETRY : A MYSTERY OR MISERY?

Poets have the most of broken affairs, broken lives, broken interpersonal co existences; we have shards in our chest. But in the same light, we have poets who have perfect affairs, perfect lives, perfect interpersonal co existences. So, does any make us less of a poet? Maybe not.

Ben Lerner was one of those buoyant writers who expatiated on the matter with poetry. In his speech, he said :
"For Ben Lerner, poems are the perfect medium for failure. So how can they negotiate with the politics of real life?

Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself venting to a friend who’d been a literature professor. I told her I was unsatiated by the course—it felt like when I had discovered poetry and found, in practice, this most lyric of arts often meant writing about flowers or describing an epiphany in the grocery store checkout line. My friend laughed. “You know your problem?” she said. “You thought that philosophy would be Truth and poetry would be beauty"

Apparently, this is Ben Lerner’s problem too. In his new book, The Hatred of Poetry, the poet, novelist, and MacArthur “genius” argues that if you love poetry’s promise of transcendence, you must also hate poems for their failure to keep up their end of the bargain. “Poetry,” Lerner writes, “arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine.” The only problem? Poems are ultimately human rather than divine in character. “As soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem,” he continues, “the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time… but when you wake… you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.” In other words, if you’re a poet, you may declare yourself the unacknowledged legislator of the world, but you’re really just a hobbyist in the verse game."

So when I say I regret being a poet— perhaps you'd see from a different angle. But the tragedy is... I won't stop being a poet.

By:
Yusuf Balogun Gemini
IG: @balogunyusufgemini