I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry

“I don’t like the word ‘poetry,’ and I don’t like poetry readings, and I usually don’t like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I’m kind of a curator, and I’m kind of a night-owl reporter.” So declares Tom Waits, the gravel-voiced troubadour who walked among shadows and sang for the forgotten. His words sound like rebellion, yet beneath them lies a deeper truth: that poetry, stripped of labels, is not a performance nor a posture, but the raw gathering of life’s fragments, and the midnight witnessing of what others overlook.

The meaning of this saying lies in the distrust of names. Waits refuses the word poetry, not because he despises its essence, but because the word has grown heavy with pretension. Too often, he suggests, the poet is enthroned as prophet, the poetry reading becomes spectacle, and the living pulse of art is lost. Instead, he calls himself a curator, gathering pieces of the world—voices, noises, images, scraps of memory—and arranging them with reverence. He calls himself a night-owl reporter, one who stays awake while others sleep, chronicling the secret stories of the city, the sighs of alleyways, the songs of the abandoned.

This posture recalls the ancient role of the bard, who walked not in palaces but among people. Think of Homer, blind wanderer, who listened to sailors and soldiers and spun their tales into epics. He was less a priest of high poetry than a reporter of human struggle, stitching voices together into one vast song. Tom Waits stands in this lineage, a man who distrusts titles yet embodies their essence, who claims not the mantle of “poet,” yet delivers lines that pierce like scripture.

History shows that such distrust of titles is the mark of authenticity. Consider Diogenes the Cynic, who mocked philosophers even as he lived philosophy more fiercely than any of them. He scorned pomp and pretense, but his life itself became a teaching that endured through ages. So too with Waits: by denying the word “poet,” he frees himself to practice the craft without its burdens. He becomes the scavenger-saint of language, unbound by tradition, answering only to the truth he hears in the midnight air.

The lesson is plain: do not cling to names. A title does not make you what you are. To call yourself a poet, a scholar, or a leader means little if your life does not embody the work. Better to be nameless and true, than titled and hollow. Waits shows us that art is not in the word, but in the practice; not in the self-proclaimed role, but in the faithful gathering of life’s shards into meaning.

Practically, this calls us to live as curators of our own worlds. Collect the voices around you: the laughter of a friend, the cry of a child, the hum of machines, the silence of dusk. Arrange them, honor them, make from them a song or a story. And live also as night-owl reporters, attentive when others pass by blind, listening to what is whispered in darkness. For the world speaks endlessly, but only the awake will hear.

Thus we pass on this teaching: greatness is not in labels, but in listening. To be a poet is not to bear the name, but to bear witness. To be an artist is not to stand on a stage, but to stand in the shadows, curating truth and reporting it with honesty. Let us then leave aside the empty weight of titles, and instead live with the fierce humility of the watcher, the gatherer, the teller of what the world itself is singing.