Poetry's Not What It Used To Be—And Neither Are We

2022

Poetry's Not What It Used To Be—And Neither Are We

I have officially been a writer for a couple of years now but not necessarily a poet, even though technically I have this past week just launched my first collection of poems and I have made at least one sale, which, I guess, means I’m technically a poet. Hurray? Another title I can bestow upon myself in the never-ending struggle of a girl-now-woman who can’t make up her mind about what she wants to be when she grows up.

I once read that calling oneself a poet is an extremely pretentious thing to do. That could be just one single person’s opinion that I had the luck or tragedy to come upon as a shard of truth or a dagger igniting revolving insecurities. I don’t remember who said it, but I later googled “poetry pretentious” and there are more than two million variations of results, so I guess it’s not just one person’s opinion. And I’ve never met anyone who is a full-time poet—though they exist—so I have no way to negate that opinion, whether poets are truly pretentious, though the full-time poets I’ve across on the internet seem nice and cool and so far as I could tell, did not have anything stuck up anything. Still, pretentiousness is fairly easy to disguise nowadays.

What does the declaration of an identity point to anyway? That we make money from said activity? What about those who declare themselves as moms or dads or activists or ramen-lovers? What kind of strange rule is it that as soon as a guy has an idea for a company that nobody needs, all of a sudden, he changes his Twitter bio to “founder” or “working on changing the world” and that’s what he is. Has he actually found anything? So why do I have a hard time calling myself a poet when there is nothing smaller than stringing together a few words on the page? When the aim of creating art so mundane it has no colour, no texture, no sound, nothing else but letters and spaces and punctuation (sometimes not even that), how do my insecurities not even allow me to do that without feeling like I am deeply offending someone?

I already feel pretentious enough calling myself a writer, and I’m not fully sure why that is. It seems a little bit like it’s not specific enough to be a real job, but the vagueness through which I say it feels as if I’m dodging a question. The truth is I get paid quite well to write things. Then again, I spent all summer writing and revising poems and the amount I got paid for it is disproportionately abysmal compared to the amount I get paid to write other things. Objectively, in my biased opinion, my poetry isn’t any less valuable than the articles I write teaching founders how to start companies or the websites I write to sell beautiful things. Anyway, I write poetry. I don’t recite it. So I suppose I still fit squarely into the occupation of writer. So writer I remain.

Some say that the pretentiousness of poetry comes from the perceived intent and focus of poetry to make things more challenging than they should be, more flowery than mainstream comprehension will allow so that only the smartest and most astute among us can grasp it, like creating a form of art with the purpose of weeding out the intellectually deprived, a club only for people who have the privilege of time to spend dissecting metaphors.

As a commercial writer (definition: a writer expressly designed to make companies money, not a television ad script writer), I’m supposed to sit as far away from flowery and abstract things in favour of clarity, a focus on the user, data to measure what’s working and what’s not. I’m supposed to go for language that pops, that grabs attention, not language that fades into a muddle of obscurity, languishing in complexity in the name of craft. Contrary to the voice you’re privy to here, a mish-mash of everything I am, both copywriter and poet, this is the number one rule I abide by to when writing for companies: write using the audience/buyer’s language. Write to be understood. If they don’t get it, they’re not going to buy it.

Well, and that’s precisely why a lot of people hate poetry. Because they don’t get it.

I, too, have been personally victimized by overly abstract poetry. I don’t want to admit that I’m dumb, so I supposed it’s easier to call poetry pretentious. Really, a lot of poetry just makes me feel stupid. That’s even after I’ve spend over a decade now studying, thinking about and practicing the art and science of language in multiple contexts but always for a measurable audience, making me if not the expert on language at least an expert of my craft. I admit, I may be overly focused on audience resonance and understanding: I cut my teeth in technical customer support first for eCommerce then for code education, and this I consider one of my rare and highly specialized skillsets though it’s not monetarily rewarded as such. The worst thing you can do is make people feel stupid, because they aren’t. I’m not absent of reason; I don’t believe the customer is always right, but I do believe that more often than not, someone thinking they’re stupid is a knowledge management, UX, or straight up simply a language problem. If one person thinks they’re stupid, many others won’t speak up to say the same. They’ll just suffer in silence and eventually give up. Whether I was teaching entrepreneurs about UX for selling things or creative people how to write their first lines of Javascript, I always kept in mind the goal: it’s not to be right. Firstly, as an employee in both those scenarios, it’s to keep customers happy and the company making money. Secondly and less obvious, it’s to break down the barriers to help someone succeed in something, because that feeling applied to anything is a powerful one that many people have not have the privilege to feel in the many spaces that have been built and coded for a specific kind of person. In other words, get them that lightbulb moment. Individually, that can be the beginning of something new. Collectively, that’s how we get to something new.

Aside from being difficult to understand, poetry is also disproportionately complex given its length, navel-gazey and sentimental, and until to my recent knowledge, mostly written by rich white people talking about how they love the trees or how they miss their lovers. Intellectually, I know that poetry could be about anything and be written by anyone, but the poetry that I remember studying in high school went like this. I can’t even remember their names (disclaimer: I am far removed enough from high school to actually not remember much of anything at all, so grains of salt, everyone). The two exceptions are John McCrae and Robert Frost whose poems I enjoyed and remember but who notably are both white men.

So when I signed up for a free-form, multi-genre writing class hoping to work on sharpening my pen for the short stories I had started to write in what I had declared to be the year I started taking my own writing seriously, I wasn’t expecting to try poetry. But amidst the short stories, TV pilot script, and multiple memoirs, there, innocuously and without declaration, I had my first up close and personal experience with poetry as an adult. It’s been a while and I’m not going to say that I was swept off my feet when I heard a fellow writer share her poetry and that changed my mind and everything was sunshine and done—though hearing her words, proud and shiny and twisted and turning to reveal unexpected ways of perceiving and feeling, certainly sparked enough of something that over the course of the next many months, I became a lot more curious.

There was a convenience component to it, too. After spending months writing short stories and going through a laborious revision process, I wanted something that would stretch me creatively but take less time and effort than it was taking me to complete a story. I was a writer—and creative—but not quite a creative writer, and I wanted something I could really sink into without full-bodied, all-out commitment that writing long-form requires. Practically, independent and grown-up as much as my identity has not quite caught up to that fact yet, I am always thinking about money. Having just started freelancing full-time, my concern with the practicalities of living were amplified. I had an upcoming mortgage to complete on in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, and I could not afford to spend all my time making art that wasn’t making money. Still, I had a creative itch to scratch. A yearning to stretch my writing further and deeper but also to tread lightly enough not to burn out.

Poetry, short and sweet/salty/bitter/sour/umami—was it.

Now, if you’re familiar with the poetry world, you may be thinking: I’ll bet you love Insta-poetry then. Is this going to be another “Insta-Poetry is great” defence? No, it’s not, but if you haven’t read those, you should. I’m all for variety, diversity, and choice.

The journey was slow-starting. I was exposed to some early favourites through the workshops I attended: Ntozake Shange and Eileen Myles, two names I’d never heard before writing poems who eschewed the standards I had formed in my head—it was the first time my literary senses were tickled and not merely challenged. Okay I see what you’re doing here. I googled basic things like “poetry”, then “poetry in 2022”, “modern poetry”. I researched the Millennial icon Insta-poet Rupi Kaur, whose books at the front of the bookstore I had always walked past because poetry “isn’t my thing”. I finally read them, probably breaking the record for how many times one should be exposed to a thing before they make the purchase (it used to be 7, now it’s infinity). I watched her Amazon Special. I even bought a single ticket to her world tour in my city when I asked around and everyone was disinterested in paying a concert ticket to watch someone recite poetry. I conducted my own primary research: I mentioned Rupi Kaur many times in conversation with all kinds of people—”if you haven’t seen her poetry on Instagram, you’ve probably seen her books at the front of bookstores”—confident that if they didn’t read poetry but were in the cultural know, that they would get it. I’d note silently always the kind of reaction I’d get from my subjects of research: mostly neutral, “oh yeah I think I’ve heard of her” to a few, almost imperceptible if I hadn’t been searching, but nonetheless unmistakeable eye rolls. I didn’t find anyone I knew in my personal circles who was a fan. I stalked her Instagram account where I noted too that she did not seem like the celebrated poet of yesteryear but a celebrity with her designer gowns and perfectly staged photos. I noted my own judgments: her poetry seemed basic on paper, though punchy, but it really came alive read out loud and especially by her. She, and her words, are captivating in person. In fact, it was probably my manic googling of Rupi Kaur that alerted the algorithmic gods, who decided to show me the ad that led me to buying the ticket to her world tour so that I could get even closer to the most vividly potent experience of Rupi Kaur possible, no screen between us.

This is the woman who, although not the sole participant, rose up in a genre named so because it grew so large and so prominent it needed its own label. Whether scapegoat or icon of a cultural moment or the byproduct of a very successful PR campaign, 2017 was Rupi’s year, with articles from the likes of Rolling Stone to The New York Times declaring her “Queen of the Insta-poets”, and the “pop star of poetry”. The buzz, in fact, did translate to sales and an increase in poetry readership and a few more bestselling Insta-poets making charts, including an anonymous 3x New York Times bestselling poet who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and calls himself Atticus. Sidenote: Am I, a Canadian, biased for mentioning by name now two Insta-poets who are Canadian, or are Canadians just disproportionately good at Insta-poetry? It must be something in our maple syrup, though I have a theory it has to do with being in close proximity to the biggest fame-maker in the world, something like having an older sibling and being subconsciously trained to find alternative ways to make it beyond the paved path that never felt within reach for them.

Significantly, poetry had been on a steep downward trend from 1992 to as recently as 2015. Then, with the rise of Insta-poetry, the genre went from a swift death to becoming one of the fastest-growing literary genres. Revival. Renaissance. Reset. These were some of the words the media used. Aside from fuelling an increase in poetry sales, the movement coincided with a change in how we consume poetry: through social media, on a screen, in our inboxes, single poems for the first time since most of us were in school, poems that were read for pleasure for the first time also since school, pleasure experienced in communion and not just as lonely dots in the world.

And in a twist of events, as poets became modern celebrities chasing likes and virality on Instagram, actual celebrities tried their hands at becoming poets.

There’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. Lana Del Rey’s book, Violets Bent Over Backwards in the Grass, is among the creamier of the crop (though has been criticized for its lack of poetry) which also includes Halsey, Lili Reinhart, Alicia Keys, and Amber Tamblyn. Also, James Franco, who wrote a poem about Lana Del Rey. He was going to write an entire book about Lana Del Rey but that got scrapped. Taylor Swift, at the height of poetry (and there was a height: sales have decreased slightly since their 2017 boom) wrote a few poems, one of which was recited in front of screaming fans as an interlude before “Getaway Car” during her Reputation tour. Then of course there are the singer-songwriters whose lyrics could be poems but who have instead chosen to make their careers in the glitzy arenas of pop, rock, and rap music. Or poets who have caught the eye of stars adjacent to poetry like Warsan Shire, whose work inspired and was featured in much of Beyonce’s 2016 album Lemonade. Less famous are the numerous iterations of people who work in marketing who call themselves “poets with day jobs”, perhaps the most commonplace version of the poet slashie hybrid: the poet/marketer, which in some ways makes perfect sense and in other ways makes none.

Then I was introduced to Amanda Gorman, another breed: poet/future politician. Technically, I’d been introduced to Amanda the year prior when she was splashed all over the news for writing and reciting “The Hill We Climb” at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration—but I was about to get well acquainted. I remember thinking: strange, this is the second time a poet, of all people, has gone viral in mainstream culture in the last five years. I mean, one’s a flash, possibly a smart PR ploy. Two is a cultural moment. Amanda Gorman who was on the cover of Vogue, the first poet-by-trade ever to do so, who has the confidence of a superstar: “It's okay to seek greatness. That does not make me a black hole seeking attention. It makes me a supernova." Amanda Gorman who wants to run for president and not in the way Ye does.

Should you be surprised? It’s not the only occurrence poetics has intersected with politics in history. Former US President Jimmy Carter was a published poet and poems have long been written about politics. Barack Obama wrote and published two poems when he was 19 in the 1980s. I read his book of speeches dating all the way back to before he had a presidential speech-writer, and they were powerful and persuasive. His early pursuits clearly influenced his future path to presidency; this talent and skill, paired with political ambition, paved the way. Had Barack grown up during the era of social media, he might’ve followed a similar trajectory to Amanda: poet to influencer to leader of the free world—though Amanda would be the first to tell you she wanted to be president first. (Before poetry, not Obama; she was born in 1998.)

The desire to improve the world mixed with the incredible gift of being able to persuade and inspire people is a potent combo, one that I’m surprised isn’t being leveraged more often in politics—though plenty of contemporary poets have long used poetry as a form of activism. Today, with social media the way word travels, poetry is now another path to influence. But don’t be too impressed: making faces, pulling pranks, and putting a camera in front of every meal you eat are also paths to creating today’s influencers.

One day this past summer I was culling my phone, checking in on apps I hadn’t opened in a while, including Masterclass, that online education platform that does all the ads. I had gifted myself a subscription after they had run a 2-for-1 promo last Christmas. Given my newfound poetry curiosity, I was delighted to find poetry-related masterclasses from Billy Collins (poetry) and Margaret Atwood (creative writing) and Amy Tan (fiction, memory, imagination), and devoured all of them in a few weeks. Amanda Gorman was among them.

In her class, Amanda explained that she thinks of reciting poetry as a designed experience, how she had to consider the 3-dimensional experience that she was delivering on stage at the inauguration. In a separate interview, she recalled how she had carefully chosen her bright yellow Prada ensemble with the red headband worn like a tiara to make the bold style statement that could sit level eye-to-eye with her message, commanding presence along with her delivery. As a newbie to the world of poetry, this was the first time I had heard of anyone speaking about poetry as a visual-audio experience. Necessary confession: I am trained as a fashion designer. I like concepts and creative expression and Trojan-like vehicles of activism. I also love texture, story, and the feeling of sinking into something beautiful and warm and cozy. This was the first time I had associated poetry with fashion, though the two hold more similarities than differences, the most glaring difference that fashion isn’t taken seriously and poetry is taken too seriously. And up to this point, aside from what I at the time considered to be an anomaly for the cultural blip that is Rupi Kaur with her designer clothes and her Amazon special, I had experienced poetry as static words on a page.

With my curiosity sparked, I signed up for another workshop, this time focused on poetry. I chose it because it was generative and playful. The ad on Instagram came in rainbow gradient not the classic black and white I’m-a-serious-poet-my-words-speak-for-themselves colour scheme. The sales pitch was welcoming; I felt called out in a good way when I read “for people who write but don’t consider themselves writers”. I wasn’t ready to write with “serious” poets. I had in fact just changed all my online bios to “mostly a writer”.

I entered a Zoom room every Sunday afternoon for four weeks, full of a young-leaning group of women and non-binary people, most of them racially marginalized. Though I was still too nervous to share, I wrote and I listened like a friendly ghost with leftover things to say. A prompt was given, and then there was time to write. Listening to them recite the poems—raw and unedited and unrevised—I felt a wave of electricity and power surge through the air around me. Being in the same space where the words were generated, getting to see their faces, hear their voices, I felt like I was in the presence of the act of creative reclamation. There were poems about breakups and feminism and motherhood and saying (too many) sorries. Though I didn’t speak a word, I felt heard. This was the first time I experienced poetry as power and tenderness in one hour-long breath.

I was enamoured. By now, poetry books had become my favorites. I found myself reaching for them first, craving the convenient package of potency I could find in a single shot, just a few minutes needed to enter a world and be wrapped up in a textural experience that didn’t have to remind me to savour things; it forced the hand gently though sometimes with a much-needed brutality. When I was on a bachelorette trip to LA, we were downtown with half an hour to spare before it was time to beat the traffic to head to Disneyland, and I suggested a nearby very popular bookstore. We meandered in and I brought home a collection of poems from Nina Mingya Powles, an author I had never heard of but whose poetry referenced Mulan and hex codes and In the Mood for Love and Bladerunner, who played with two languages and that was the first time I had seen that. I had flashbacks of mom telling me Shakespeare was nothing compared to Li Bai. A few weeks after LA during a weekly family dinner—siblings and grandkids included—I told her I had started writing poetry and not only that, had meandered into a trove of contemporary Chinese poetry.

Did all that reading make me smarter and better able to appreciate poetry? I’m not sure to the first question, yes to the second. There was poetry that I still couldn’t fully understand but could tell was good because it still made me feel things (Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which got me from the title on), but there was poetry that I couldn’t understand and just felt like a person purposely writing things through a thesaurus under the water while playing telephone. Still, I actively tried to broaden and deepen my horizons. I binged—”one cannot binge poetry”, well I did—poetry collections from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners Louise Gluck and Gregory Pardlo. Whenever someone mentioned a poet they loved or hated, I placed holds for their books at the library. When I really loved a collection, I bought a copy to keep.

In between my many library visits and by now bored with Google as my main search engine, I crossed the fence and ventured over to its neighbour Youtube where I stayed a while. There I discovered one of my favorite poets, Savannah Brown, who is sometimes mistakenly categorized as a Insta-poet though she technically blew up on Youtube and her writing style is quite distinct from the concise and straightforward style that Insta-poets are famous for. Savannah was the first younger poet that I came across that simultaneously I was able to read and understand while challenging me to pay attention, who wasn’t all decorated with pedigree—her highest level of education completed was high school. She was the first poet I read that made me think, I want to do that too, an inkling with seeds that perhaps had been planted last year when I read Dana Gioia, who is older and very much pedigreed (Harvard professor, ex-VP at General Foods), though whom with I still felt a kinship with because he comes from a business and marketing background just like me. Oh, okay—not all poets have English degrees and live in poverty, I remember thinking. With Savannah, it was oh, okay—not all popular, mainstream poets are Insta-poets.

The spectrum of good poetry, not necessarily from an objective point of view, but from mine, was refreshingly diverse. I felt like I had a place somewhere in there. So here I had a new creative avenue to play with, that challenged me enough to sustain me and was quick enough to allow me to write and share, the shortness of poetry a version of accessibility itself.

But as diverse as the poetry scene was, it wasn’t without critics. In the same breath that poetry was experiencing a renaissance moment in modern history, there are swathes of critics. For the most part, Insta-poetry is not a label the poets embrace, whether they are the ones being referenced or the ones who use it not because they think it deserves a special moniker but because they considered this poetry less than, not of the same echelon, not to be spoken in the same breath as their poetry.

“That’s not real poetry!”

Okay, well I guess fake poetry it is. Better yet, call it Insta. There’s nothing more terrible than social media.

I cut my teeth in tech where it’s normal to question the status quo. Disruption is an expectation, not something to shield from or be fearful of, as the publishing industry seems to be, I’ve learned. I’ve become accustomed to a particular way of seeking answers: gather lots of data, ask a lot of questions, break apart your biases, and ship it then pivot. While I read poetry from diverse sources, I was also trying to learn the craft, to understand what it was that I paid attention to, what it was that captured me. The more I read, the more I found myself gravitating toward the poetry that I loved, which I can’t describe other than to say that it is poetry. Not too Insta, not too serious, somewhere in between. And I like surprises. I like to be able to understand, but to be shocked once in a while. So I listened. I watched. I absorbed their points, and considered their vantage point.

Stephen Fry, yes that one, wrote a book on the craft of poetry, The Ode Less Travelled, that I count among one of my favorite reads this year for lines such as “worthless arse-dribble” (how he describes what he has to read when judging poetry competitions). In it, he concludes that much of modern poetry “suffers from anaemia”, with “few gutsy explosions of life and colour”. I was almost convinced when he nearly won me over with his claim that describing poetry as pretentious is a way to avoid learning how to “discriminate between the authentic and the fraudulent”, and I had to ask myself: am I just calling something pretentious to mask my ignorance for craft? Stephen Fry’s book, it’s worth noting, was published in 2005, way before the rise of Insta-poetry, so he wasn’t even specifically referring to that. The biggest thing happening to poetry then was that it was dying. Perhaps Stephen Fry could not have predicted that it would be revived in such a way and that the questions on craft and pretentiousness he posed would be amplified and asked over and over again. Not only that, but they form the core of a larger question, related to but beyond craft or taste: whose opinion matters?

They call this new poetry the equivalent of posting Tumblr quotes or mediocre tweets and repackaging them as poems, though I find it funny that their best argument, proof of lack of quality is just close proximity to social forms of media, forms of media with a built-in filter that act as a transparent metric of success. Likes or shares, leading to attention, are the new currency. The non-metric version of success, “taste”, a centralized form of attention, powered by money and privilege, are the only true things dying—not poetry itself. If Anna Wintour came around to it enough to put Kim Kardashian on the cover of Vogue in 2008, much to the chagrin of much more than just a handful of people, and then to say “I think if we just remain deeply tasteful and just put deeply tasteful people on the cover, it would be a rather boring magazine,” then maybe the troves of people who have self-appointed themselves as arbiters of taste can, too. Although I agree with Stephen that writing poetry should be an act of love, I don’t believe that love for the particularities of language in the specific ways that groups of people (mostly men, all white) dictated to be true and correct form, a long time ago, is the only way that love can manifest.

It is clear when listening to Rupi speak, that there is love, and anger, and joy, and power in her poetry. Still, they criticize. What they make fun of her the most for, that there are actual parodies, are the apparently random line breaks she and others who follow the same form use. Like this:

I understood that
from a
design perspective:
the shorter the line, the easier it is for the eye
to read.

The easier it is to read, the bigger the audience. Coincidence? I think not. Intentional? Maybe not. Intuitively placed based on how they themselves find it easiest to read on the internet when our eyes are trained to keep moving? Probable. Also not a coincidence: responsible for the uptick in both readers and writers are a surge of new voices, many of whom are young, female or non-binary, queer, people of colour who have traditionally not been treated kindly by publishing nor who traditionally have had much of a voice at all in the world.

There’s something I have to say here on one of the downsides of social media that I know intimately. We have by now, in a swipe and scroll environment, mostly moved on from clickbait, which is one step too many for the companies that really want to control our minds and data. Clickbait, when a hooky title draws someone into an article of low correlation to the title, is an amateur’s game. Today, the hook is just the beginning. Content needs to keep people hooked. Tricking people for a split second isn’t enough. We’re scouring for controversial angles and playing them up for longer. We used to be tricked and know it; now trickery is the entire game, the basis of the mirage disguised as authenticity. We are manufacturing outrage in order to get views and keep the cycle going while contorting our digital selves to maximum relatability. It’s the nature of the world we live in, where a content creator who doesn’t care much about Rupi Kaur at all will make a video about her expressing a very strong opinion because Rupi Kaur is famous and lots of people (like I did) search her up. They will do that because this is how they make money, with the ad revenue and sponsorships they get—higher views meaning more money. So much of the internet is built this way, a mirage where you can’t tell what’s a real feeling while they push at your buttons not because of any lack of morality, but because of the drive to survive in a system that rewards engagement.

Because of this, I constantly have to remind myself that there are now swathes of critics for everything and perhaps the problem is not as dire as it’s blown up to be. There is no such thing as universal acclaim because the tiniest segment of critics are the loudest in a machine that rewards the opinionated. Perhaps there is room for everyone as long as we can get far away not to let the noise drown out the pursuit of our own personal wonderlands, to be influenced in the direction of the things we love, not to shut off from the world in a swirling blur of opinions we have been tricked into believing.

And besides, I learned from everyone. Some of the critics were constructive, offering technical reasons why certain poems were lazy, a poet’s worst offence according to Stephen Fry. From their criticisms, I learned to write better poems—notably, better according to me. I learned to write better when my workshop instructor sent a page of notes on the collection of poems I wrote, pushing me to go one step beyond the cliches I was leaning on. I learned to write better from replaying and really listening to the lyrics on Taylor Swift’s Folklore, and then reading the comments from fans whose careful dissections showed me more than I had initially gleaned. I learned from hearing a viral poem on TikTok, Song of the Prettybird by Shay Alexi full of chaotic-sounding but intentionally-written repetition. The version that went viral wasn’t from the poet themself, but recited by model Madeline Ford. Madeline later spoke about how the turning point in her trajectory as a content creator was the poetry she started reading out loud. Her male to female follower, like, and comment count ratio shifted dramatically, all the men who came for her face and body disappeared, just like the “pigeon men” who “track me from cross sky highway” who got bored when pretty had a voice.

I learned to write better by paying attention to feelings and senses and memories and sounds. Through all of that, I learned that to write better means to improve the craft of paying attention—to sound, image, form, words, whatever helps you communicate what you want to say to the people you want to reach, and paying attention to those things before what wants to be expressed is even known, the senses forming synapses that make meaning. That’s it. Stripped away of the abstraction of “better” and even “writing”—a.k.a. the act of composing words—what I was really looking for wasn’t to become the objectively best poet to be understood and read by a very small portion of the population, nor was it to dilute my affection for language to go viral; it is to be who I am, to understand it, to record it, and to share it with the people who may take something from it the same way I took something from the poems I loved, some of them I understood fully and others I understood only partially, but none of them I understood none at all.

I was officially in the poetry rabbit hole and it was a whole new world. But there is an elephant in the room for me, something I’ve ignored for the most part until now but has to be mentioned because it forms a big part of my journey into poetry. Is there money in this?

I hope I’m not offending any real, serious poets who may be reading this, who cringe at the word monetization but who in the same breath, as they rightly should, desire to make money doing what they love. We live in a capitalist society and if there is value in being part of a economic chain of technological mechanisms where the gift we are bestowed with is a false sense of convenience and time, then there is value in what poets do, every kind of poet, who bring us all back to every colour of truth that can be imagined.

Could there be reciprocal value for a sustainable, creative, positive force for change that are the people who pay attention to themselves, their communities, and the world around them when they read and write poetry? Can that reciprocal value sustain more value, more ways of seeing the world, more diversity and more breadth in who can play and win at the game? Is there any money in poetry or is Rupi Kaur like the J.K. Rowling of the poetry world? A massive outlier on par to the scale of a once-in-a-generation anomaly? While J.K.’s IP has built theme parks and Rupi’s selling concerts like a pop star, is there room for me and others like me, neither superstar enough to be Insta nor pedigreed enough to be serious?

You don’t get into something without understanding what it is you’re getting into. And after all of that, a poetry binge, eyes wide open and hungry for more, equipped with a chart reminiscent of the pros and cons comparing two teenage crushes labelled “Insta” versus “Serious” in my arsenal and discarded in pursuit of the in-between of me, I still found myself wondering: what is a real poem? 

Maybe the question isn’t whether this poetry is "real", but whether it's reaching people in the way that art is supposed to—whether it is connecting, resonating, and sparking something for its audience. Poetry is finding space for itself within the fractured, fast-moving world we live in today. Not because anyone else said so, but because it just did. How do I know? Because I felt it. I was there and I am here, still exploring these questions. But I do know this: who has any right to tell anyone else what should or shouldn't move them? Poetry changed—and it's changing—because we did.