Not a Poet. Now I Know It.

I was once a poet. I was a poet when poetry was easy and bad and all good poetry had to be was typed in a nice font and situated next to a neat picture inside a plastic folder with an equally neat picture on the cover. But now I find the more I study poetry, the more I read it and the more I write it, the worse I get. And not only that, but I don't feel like a poet anymore. I feel like a poser. Maybe that's because I write fiction. But poetry was my first love. It was what I filled up journal after journal and notebook after notebook of with horrible mopey self-indulgent poems. Of course I did alliterate quite nicely. Then again maybe I feel that way because the study of poetry has still not given my any hard criteria by which to judge what is good and bad. Some stuff is obviously bad, everyone knows that, but then there is poetry I am supposed to love, but can't see why. And of course there is no reason. It is a communication of the soul and is seemingly just as elusive.