Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. — Leonard Cohen

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

Author: Leonard Cohen

Insight: Most of us think of poetry as something rare and special—something that happens in books or in the minds of sensitive people. But Cohen flips this around: he's saying that if you're living fully, burning with intensity and purpose, poetry isn't the main event. It's what's left over. The ash. This matters because it takes the pressure off. You don't need to sit down and "write poetry" or become a poet to have a poetic life. You just need to actually live—to care about things enough that they consume you, to love people without holding back, to notice the small absurdities and beauties that most people rush past. That kind of burning life naturally produces poetry as its byproduct, whether you ever write it down or not. The twist is that this also works in reverse: if you find yourself unable to feel or articulate anything worth saying, it might not be a poetry problem. It might be a life problem. The ash only appears when something has actually been on fire. So maybe the question isn't "Am I poetic enough?" but "Am I living intensely enough to produce something worth leaving behind?"

Source: The Complete Poems, 1962-2012, p. 277, 2013