I would think there would be a reluctance when a real poet takes up the form. I'm being an ignoramus, but I'm not drawn to the floods of poets out there today, promoting themselves. I would think that if you're really drawn to it, you wouldn't have need of advertising the fact. Life proves to us how inconsequential we are. That we are born as babies is proof. Only those who would remind us of the underlying reality of our own insignificance beside the enduring cycles of nature play by the rules well enough to be listened to, though I know this sounds extreme.

That there are so many who write out there today seems part of the whole Big Bang theory, the drifting outward of all matter and Universes into the cold irrelevant depths of space, where ultimately even atomic matter itself falls apart and disappears. Where once there was but one Ernest Hemingway, today there'll be a thousand, and tomorrow ten thousand. Keats covered the bases of being Keats, if we could stop and listen; we don't need four million of him. But on the other hand, even that doesn't hurt, or matter, because it's all the same, and doesn't make a difference. Even our little solar system, that home of great significance here, having been born will one day fall apart. The sun knows this, and wanes in enthusiasm, and even our clouds thicken. And even because of the very great insignificance of this fact, it will take an infinitely long time, because ultimately even the end is insignificant, hardly worth mention. And what the hell, it keeps us alive today, and when the time comes we'll build a space ship, stock it with wine and music and people, and go off to somewhere else equally insignificant or maybe just vanish.

If you were to write, write about real things that happen to you, things that are important, that had their effect upon your life. Do it well, and then put it away somewhere. Then go out into the world and try humility. Be humble. Earn a Byzantine halo, a lotus position, an inner electric cross.

Lincoln's gone. Everyone wanted to be a poet, a rockstar, a leader, bust out with their own great opinion, their vanity as generals, back then in his day, but he was the main one who cared enough to think and figure how to say something useful. So they snickered at him and his own poetry, called him a baboon. Well, it is worth noting that many in fact did get his poetry, agreed with it, even in some form of suspension.

We all might try to sound like Lincoln today, but the world is as it is. But unless you really do get his strange philosophical basis, such as he earned from life's experiences that suited his karma, you'll be just sounding like his cadences, but hollow.

Learn from Lincoln the lesson of his life as he taught us with his life. From nowhere's river's bank he came, then rose, maintained honesty, and then, duty done, circumstances took him, the bed too small, in a room too small, to die in. Then there was the funeral train. A grand vault, overdone. Well, what can you do? You can't blame them for wanting the Memorial for him, a way to remember his virtue, two fine speeches, declarations, on either wall, Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural. Good. No doubt about it. But a quiet country graveyard, forgotten, a simple stone, either alone or next to the grave of a woman he'd loved as a young man who'd died young, he would have preferred, in keeping with his melancholic anonymous poetry. Good for a chuckle anyway, for him, now and then, leaves fallen in the graveyard. "Ha ha! I got you," he'd say, dead, and then noble silence again.

People want recognition. Human nature. So are there claims of self-importance in writers, of which I too am guilty of. But nothing really matters that much. The published... what? They are better than you?

A real poet worthy of the practice and the title would have a great reluctance to draw attention to himself. If a poem represents that learning about poetry, then it stands a chance of being okay. But you wouldn't be a poet of any merit if you chose to be one out of vain reasons and pride or feeling that you are great at it. You'd be a poet because life forced it on you, maybe not quite as dramatically as say, the brothers JFK left behind, but because you had not so much choice.

That state, you can feel free to paint, as how you anonymously slip into a bookshop on a Friday night, grab two volumes recommended by an old friend and mentor, and walk out alone up the street. I would think it would be a really odd feeling to be out on the sidewalk, still anonymous, and see your own book stacked in the window, promoted. You'd be reminded of how honestly you became a poet.

"The world has enough angst in it," my mother said to me yesterday. "Write about wine." I agree. I don't find real talk of poetry as angst, but rather nature, and life, and therefore, joy.

How did Vonnegut put it? My name is Jan Janson. I live in Wisconsin...