Live Encounters Poets on Poetry July 2026
Can anyone become a poet? by Jordan Smith.
When I started writing seriously back in the early 1970’s, there were two anthologies readily available for American beginners who wanted to get their bearings. One codified the younger members of what we thought of as academic poets: often skilled at traditional forms and prestigiously, prodigiously educated. If you were a small-town kid from a public high school studying at a newly founded experimental state college, this seemed an uncomfortably exclusive club. The other, foregrounding a range of mostly free-verse poets, not all university-affiliated, who had held a variety of jobs and a variety of more esoteric interests, was also more welcoming, partly because it included a selection of “statements on poetics” that offered the same sort of DIY promise as the not-quite-contemporaneous Whole Earth Catalog, whose subtitle was access to tools.
What you need to become a poet is a tradition, which serves both as instruction and permission, and a way to find your start in it. Anthologies offer that, as long as you find the right one, as do the communities of writers of which any anthology is just one example. After that, it’s up to you and luck. The best luck of all is the right teacher. As Japhy Ryder (a fictional version, in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, of one of the poets in the second anthology) says, “I always meet my Bodhisattvas on the street,” Can anyone? You’ve got to keep your eyes open.
© Jordan Smith
Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, Jordan Smith recently retired after four decades of teaching at Union College. His latest books are Cold Night, Long Dog from Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press and Little Black Train from 3 Mile Harbor Press. He’s working on a volume of selected and new poems and a series of essays about poetry, history, and music. You may reach him at smithj@union.edu.