social media's revitalisation of poetry

i watched this video recently and generally liked what it was putting down-- i've now subscribed to roughest drafts and if you're interested in poetry, i think you might like it too! i've been wanting to watch something on poetry that was both analytical and profound for a while now. but you don't need to watch the video to understand my point.

the video talks about how many new people are coming into poetry through instapoetry and/or rupi kaur's work. he said that this is just a new genre of poetry, and he hopes that by the time this subgenre stops trending, a better one will have taken its place. he's kind of dismissive about the genre, but i get that because this is all subjective and i'm not a fan of it either, anyway.

but this subgenre was one of the reasons i came into poetry. (somehow my other reason is more embarrassing: ddlc.) and even though a lot of people who are into poetry dislike this genre, it has boosted the popularity of poetry, both as a form of self-expression and as a form of art! people are posting stuff that took them two minutes to write and calling it poetry, sure, but i know that at least i have benefited from it. i write and read poetry, and i like to think what i engage with now is more complex than instapoetry.

and i know it's not just me because i see examples of it online. in fact, a comment under this video put it pretty well:

"... i'm part of a local swap page on facebook, and easily the mostly frequent books people are looking to trade are kaur's. almost always young women looking for more obscure/dedicated poetry. i think that's a good thing! it suggests to me that people start with her, and then grow and continue on that path."

i think that it's wonderful that even if people get started on the "wrong foot", a number of those people will eventually shift onto the right one and get deeper into poetry as a whole.

but that got me thinking about why i was on the wrong foot in the first place. i remember poetry as either (a) hard, because of school (b) embarrassing, because of people my age/media/the internet. the latter is pretty easy to dissect; being vulnerable or unironic is seen as a weakness, especially in teenagers, especially online.

but the former really bothered me. i remember reading poems and thinking "huh, that's interesting" but never wanting to read or write one on my own and never wanting to seriously engage with it. i remember my english teacher saying poetry was all about the spoken word, and that all poems were meant to be listened to, not read. i took this at face value and assumed that because i didn't want to read out my emo poems to a crowd, i didn't want to write poetry at all.

it would be really easy to blame that teacher for my mistake, but i don't think that would be right. rather, it's more that poetry is almost always presented as this big, untouchable art form. it's really hard to write good poetry, so why bother? if you don't want to read your poem out loud, don't bother writing in the first place, it's not going to be doing any good tucked away in a notebook. i think that poetry has almost as much, if not more, of the pretentiousness of classic literature.

i think this discouraging reputation can be disassembled by going back to the basics:

• poetry is art.
• art is self-expression.

however!

• art is also a performance.

that line between self-expression and performance is often blurred, which is confusing (for people like me at least.) by ignoring the performance side of poetry and focusing on the self-expression, you can get something concrete down on paper. or type, i don't care, it's a figure of speech. this probably goes for all forms of art; you probably won't be good at it at first. but over time, if you continue to read and write, you will improve. you can get comfortable with the art form and confident in your work.

and it is at that point that art can be performance, if you want.

i really want other people to learn the value there is to poetry as a form of purely self-expression, among others, because it has helped me. prose can serve as good stress relief but poetry fits for broader and vaguer feelings, at least in my experience. some people like listening to poetry with rhyme and rhythm, some people like to sit down and reread a poem till they understand all the little nuances. you can take your time figuring out how you want to digest poetry. i know i said this before, but it's all subjective.

if you felt similarly about poetry as how i described i used to feel, please give it a shot. the video i linked at the start could be good motivation, but you can also read and analyse classics or contemporary stuff. i would recommend visiting the poetry foundation because of the giant variety and accessibility. they even have a poem-of-the-day, so if you get overwhelmed you could just look at that every now and then. as for writing, in december 2024 i tried writing one poem every day for a month. by the end i kind of hated it, but i learnt a lot about writing and how i like to do it. it was a really valuable experience, so i also recommend that!

thank you for reading,

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ callalillie ˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆