Living Like the Poets
“She said that was the only way for us to live, to be like the poets. That’s what she said. If all you ever see is reality, you just want to die.”- Durian Sukegawa, Sweet Bean Paste
As I was reading Durian Sukegawa’s work, these few lines caught my attention.
Should we make a constant effort to cross the barrier from reality into poetry, even in the midst of our mundane days? And first — can the mind of a poet even be characterized?
I couldn’t come up with a clear definition, so I began looking into what has been said about the poetic mindset. Lola, from The Student Lola blog, offered an interesting perspective. We are taught to be rational thinkers — for understandable reasons. The unrefined path is risky, and many of us are risk-averse; we lack courage. She describes the average person in today’s society as a “thinker,” a “procrastinator,” a “skeptic,” or simply “much too rational.”
Poets, on the other hand, are framed in a far more ethereal light: they are doers, lovers, romantics. They live for enrichment, for joy, liveliness, and charisma. To live like a poet is to believe in the intrinsic uniqueness of every individual — and to live by that belief, unapologetically.
I have to admit: I initially held a few clichés about the poet’s mindset. I imagined it to be whimsical, brooding, dreamlike. But after reading Ryan Wilson’s essay “How to Think Like a Poet,” I saw things differently.
The poetic mindset, he argues, is actually a go-getter’s mindset — one that chooses discomfort over ease, depth over surface, meaning over convenience. It is countercultural. It is seeing before interpreting — seeing without the blindness of habit. “To think like a poet,” Wilson writes, “is to seek to unite the fragments, to seek a full and unified vision of life that includes the individuality and uniqueness of each experience and of each individual, and also allows for the commonality shared by individuals and experiences.”
Thinking like a poet is living with a deep concern for the health of the human soul. It is a striving toward a truly fulfilling human experience by promoting authenticity.
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