"Personally, I think that those of us like myself who produce poetry in fitful little blips of activity, with long, long dry spells between them, are poets when we are engaging with the world in a poetic way (whether or not anything actually gets written then), but are not poets anymore when we aren't."
What other title can you think of that only applies when you're doing the activity that the title implies? Are you only a teacher while teaching? Only a librarian when shelving books and shooshing noisy patrons? Only a doctor while seeing patients?
I know this isn't really important, but I think the reason I insist on allowing a freer use of the word "poet" is that I object to treating the word as a special word that exalts and compliments the person it is applied to. I think you can be a poet and never write a poem that is actually any good. If writing poetry is, as Susan put it, a way you define yourself, then I can't think of a reason to begrudge a person that title.
Also, do we really need such a restrictive definition of "poet"? Why? So we can shame and criticize those who adopt it without meeting our standards? So we can deny the title to those whose success bothers us? So we can beat ourselves up during a dry period by saying that we're not even poets? When we get too finicky about whom to call a poet, we are perhaps taking ourselves too seriously.
You don't need to be good at it or do it all the time to be a "poet."
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