A fielded crowd

If I was ever going to be defined, it would be as a poet. If I'd been a more disciplined athlete or dedicated farm kid, would those traits have taken hold? I don't believe so. Given the standard of my earliest efforts, there must have been some deep seated attraction to writing verse.
What pains me is that I emerge to find folk who, when they're done slinging off at people calling themselves poets, they call themselves poets. Loud, obnoxious, repetitive, obvious, insolent.. there's a lot of scope as to what to utilise in your production and delivery; just as with many another pursuit.

And that's where I run into trouble. I barely got through Study of Poetry as, by that stage, I had well formed notions of what poetry is and how it should go. These were theoreticians in search of a B muse
I did get one poem out of humanities (not saying the faculty doesn't appear in other guises) Postmodern Tension

No, I'm convinced the lingo is what rules. I'm too lazy to go back over all the rules to explain what I mean: language? I'm not a language snob, though it is a broader term than vocabulary or grammar and I'm trying to talk about words and their meanings at that molecular level; the power they possess in all their current and latent form.

The skill then is in delivering this with gusto, trusting that the message or original impetus remain preserved.

You have suffered through below par blogging to get to this post but, trust me, it's worth it. If you proceed from theory or sentiment then you can still produce a fine poem but I wouldn't recommend it. My advice (and posterity will out) is to grab at the idea as it passes through your thoughts; flits at first but later gets bolder the more it is noticed. Jot that down in a journal. Maybe you can work straight on the screen but I always kept hard copies and, even though I've written many poems online on message boards and newsgroups and emails and Myspace and Facebook in the intervening years, I still hand write poems in common garden variety exercise books that would have otherwise contained wiggly geometry.

II

Poetry has its origins in the vocal tradition so it's little wonder if some privilege spoken word and  slam poetry. Poetry readings fall somewhere across both disciplines: the literal image of some old coot fumbling with his specs before declaiming his scrawl.
Poetry's in podcasts and blogs and social media groups so it's certainly cyber but the live delivery, however changed, is an ironic foil to that.

It happens that, even on the page, poetry can pop up in unexpected places. Nestled near an anthology of poetry and a collection there may be a short story or a novel containing scraps of verse; a non-fiction work may preface its chapters with relevant snippets.

How do you compete where there are 560 million search results for poetry.