To think like a poet is not to write verse or master metaphor, though these may follow. It is, rather, to cultivate a particular stance towards experience: a way of inhabiting the world that refuses the purely instrumental, that insists on looking twice, that finds in the mundane the trembling possibility of meaning.

Poets think slant. Where others see a railway platform, the poet notices how commuters arrange themselves in unconscious patterns, how light falls through the station roof in geometric shafts, how a discarded coffee cup rolls in circles when the express train passes. This is not mere observation but a practice of attention that treats the world as fundamentally interesting, as dense with potential significance. To think like a poet is to resist the numbing efficiency of habit and instead approach each moment as though it might reveal something essential about what it means to be alive.

This kind of thinking demands a willingness to dwell in uncertainty. Poets are comfortable with ambiguity, with questions that spiral rather than resolve. They understand that meaning is not always found but made, constructed through the creative friction between word and world, between what we observe and what we imagine. When faced with an autumn leaf, a poet doesn’t simply categorise it botanically but wonders about its particular shade of rust, its journey from branch to gutter, the story it might tell about change and letting go. This is reflective thinking—not in the sense of mirroring reality, but of turning experience over and over, examining it from unexpected angles until it catches light differently.

Language becomes a site of play for the poetic thinker. Words are not merely functional tools but living things with histories, textures, music. To think like a poet is to take pleasure in how syllables tumble against each other, how certain combinations create tiny explosions of sound, how a well-placed word can make a sentence suddenly shimmer. This doesn’t mean overwriting or pretension, but rather a heightened sensitivity to the grain of language, to its capacity to make us see and feel more intensely.

Crucially, poetic thinking is democratic. It finds significance everywhere, not just in traditionally ‘poetic’ subjects like sunsets or love. A supermarket carpark at dusk, an overheard conversation on a bus, the pattern of cracks in a footpath—all become worthy of attention, all pulse with potential meaning. This is perhaps the most radical aspect of thinking like a poet: the insistence that nothing is merely ordinary, that wonder is always available if we choose to look.

To think like a poet is also to recognise our own part in creating meaning. We are not passive receivers of a fixed reality but active participants in an ongoing conversation between self and world. Our experiences, memories, and associations colour everything we perceive. The poet accepts this subjectivity not as limitation but as gift, understanding that personal perspective is the very ground from which authentic understanding grows.

Ultimately, to think like a poet is to live more deliberately, to refuse the sleepwalk of routine, to insist on presence. It is to believe that how we attend to life matters profoundly, that careful noticing is itself a form of care, that in seeking the extraordinary within the seemingly ordinary, we honour both the world and our brief passage through it.

 

16/11/2025