Poetry activist Luís Rodriguez, Jr., has said that "Everyone is a poet. The ability to write a poem is inborn, and anyone can do it." While you are writing a poem, you are a poet. Are you a poet when you put the quill down, when the Screensaver comes up on your laptop and you head for the refrigerator (bookshelf) for some inspiration?

Certainly, in The United States of Poetry, poetry has met television and thus introduced new possibilities for both: a sense of relevance, for starters. But on our voyage through these states to film the show, it was actually meeting the poets, hearing them, seeing the ease with which they took the role of poet and lived in it like clothes, that inspired us.

The portraits that follow are not connected by theme, region or aesthetic, but simply by the fact that they are poets. These are real poems, and portraits of the poets who just made them up.

KELL ROBERTSON has been a rodeo cowboy, a c & w singer, and is the first man on a horse to get killed off in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. He has always been a poet. Currently somewhere on the road in the Southwest.

MAUREEN OWEN lives in Guilford, Connecticut and works for Inland Books, one of the foremost names in poetry distribution. She was Coordinator of the St. Marks Poetry Project during the 1970s. Editor of Telephone Books and Magazine.

LINDA HASSELSTROM is a poet, an essayist and a working ranch woman. Winner of the Western American Writer award, she lives in western South Dakota.

KEITH WILSON is the Poet Laureate of Las Cruces, New Mexico. His credentials range from Beat to Cowboy to university prof. He has inspired many poets, including Denise Chavez and Kell Robertson.

MIKE ROMOTH slacks in Seattle.

WALLACE MCRAE, the "Cowboy Curmudgeon," is the classic cowboy poet, and wrote what many consider the classic contemporary cowboy poem, "Reincarnation." He is the first cowboy poet to ever receive a National Heritage Award. Wally still works the family ranch in Forsyth, Montana.

MICHELE SERROS traveled with the Spoken Word Tent of Lollapalooza in 1994. She performs with the spoken word collective Guava Breasts in her native LA.

D-KNOWLEDGE (Derrick I. M. Gilbert) raps and roles in LA. He has appeared on TV, at the Apollo, and at poetry and rap clubs across the country.

SEAN McNALLY works as a file deleter, MATT COOK as a janitor, and TIM COOK as a warehouseman. They live in Milwaukee and have visited National Slams and then forgotten to show up to read.

MIKE TYLER was born and raised in New York City. The "most dangerous writer in America," he once broke his arm while reading (resulting in the poem "Logic Broke My Arm"). He was Poetry Director and editor of American Idealism Rag at the seminal downtown poetry anti-salon, ABC No Rio.

MARC SMITH is the creator of Slam. An ex-construction worker who lives in Chicago, he can still be found every Sunday running the show at the exquisite Green Mill Tavern.

Poet/shaman/activist/rocker JOHN TRUDELL has two best-selling CD's to his credit: "Graffiti Man" and "Johnny Damas & Me." He is a founding member of the American Indian Movement (AIM).