#<- guy who is procrastinating on a real essay thats due in 7 hrs

[fondcrimes]

hii u posted about poetry recently and mentioned the difficulty in finding a good poem, and specifically that you think the issue is pedagogical—i’d be so curious to hear more of your thoughts about where current(?) pedagogy might be insufficient and/or just your thoughts about contemporary poetry more broadly! no worries if you’d prefer not to though! 🫶

helloooo I would love to elaborate abt my post! thanks for asking (apologies if it gets super long though) I'm gonna break my response down into separate parts so I can better explain my perspective

I will preface this by saying I know I'm usually being haterish when I criticize the writing world in general. I understand I won't like everyone's writing and that doesn't take away from the value of a piece, but my somewhat uncharitable POV stems from my ongoing observation of writing trends and marketability (which is why we have colloquialisms like ig poetry, tumblr poetry, booktok etc). writing trends are not inherently shallow or reductive, however, we as both creators and consumers can observe how trying to sell writing produces specific "brands" of writers. the categorization of contemporary writing, to some extent, will always about marketability and branding, and then we know that digestible and palatable writing sells. it sells a whole lot! and that's not inherently bad either because that's entertainment, sometimes you just wanna read some bullshit. additionally, I don't see the value of discouraging people from reading when it's something I'm very passionate about and more people need to be reading anyway. I could talk about this in great length too but my main beef is with the over-saturation of "palatable" writing, writing that is marketed in a specific way that caters to the consumer rather than engaging an audience and provoking our curiosity and wonder. my main beef is that it creates a type of reader/consumer who is stagnant and not intellectually engaged. I think we're all too familiar with the sort of people who are more concerned with the marketable aesthetics of reading/intellectualism rather than actually using their brain *cough* booktok *cough* but the scope is much wider. I would say that neoliberal politics necessitate this mindset/level of literacy in order to function but that's such a loaded statement kgfkgjf anyway moving on~

in order to understand why people like shitty poetry, I have to understand why people like shitty writing and also why shitty writing exists in such great amounts. I kept going back to elementary school, where we made first contact with writing and reading interpretatively. underpaid overworked teachers already have it hard enough, I don't blame them for not being able to spark the joy of reading in every child they encounter. literacy is unbelievably complex and capitalism is like blood in the water. it’s also bad enough that kids are actively learning how to put themselves into like social boxes while their developing skills are placed into boxes of their own like gifted, advanced, remedial, etc. all that shit gets internalized too. when I refer to the "intellectual", I am speaking from the belief that each person has the potential to embody intellect, rather than adhere to a deluded elitist view of gatekeeping intelligence. I want readers to engage their intellectual selves because we're living in a cultural moment where it seems like nobody is using their brains anymore, nobody is thinking critically, and that's bc it's easy to shut your brain off. it dawned on me that if a child could be dissuaded from reading entirely due to bad experiences/treatment, a child could also be dissuaded from building analytical or evaluative skills of what they're reading. there are so many college students who can read but want to use chatgpt to write their essays... so many (voting-aged) adults who can read but consistently make bad-faith interpretations of tweets, articles, books, etc. I won't get into the marxism of it all but it goes back to the capitalist state, we need to be literate enough to work and participate in bureaucracy and get married and raise more workers but that's it, it's okay if our literacy stops there and I would argue politicians actually prefer that. but I'm not saying the alternative isn't difficult though... because it's meant to be!

ok so the pedagogy of it all. poetry is notorious for being kind of inaccessible to the common person for a variety of reasons but I'll focus on the fact that we're conditioned to prioritize convenience or become "lazy" readers. I didn't really know how pervasive this notion was until I was listening to ada limón talk about how people will straight up say they don't like poetry. she was talking about how really has more to do with how it's taught rather than what it is. I also reconsidered my own relationship with poetry as a form. I have the typical writer predisposition: my favorite book growing up was the giving tree, I wrote sad gay poems in high school and obviously I was a teenaged fangirl during the peak tumblr web weaving era. but I didn't think about poetry too deeply until a few years ago (during quarantine-ish) I decided I wanted to start writing seriously again after a series of depressive episodes and found my way back to contemporary poetry. I should say I'm veryyy biased and prefer studying modern poetry but I know a few things about that old greek shit too lol. I read poems I instantly really loved, but some poems even by the same poets fell flat or I straight up disliked, but I didn't know why I had those opinions. so I kind of became really obsessed with studying my favorite poems on my own, going line by line and figuring out the writing techniques and measuring their effectiveness. (I read a lotttt of writing criticism too)

now that I'm thinking about it, it was very adhd of me to obsessively read and reread short-form writing bc sometimes I simply don't have the attention span for a 20k-word creative nonfiction piece unfortunately lolll.... this was noticeably much more fun, esp compared to reading poetry in school elementary/middle/high school (even though I had enjoyed those classes too). as a teenager of the subversive aesthetic age, I still carried the notion that most poetry was about obfuscating meaning, or like purposefully being vague out of pretentiousness and exclusion. like I get why somebody would find poetry annoying, there's plenty of annoying poetry out there even in the literary world. all of this is to say that reciting poems in school or trying to teach poetry to students in absolutes (like this poem means this, this poem means that) is not conducive to comprehending the form/genre. you can’t achieve poetic understanding or connection to a poem through objectivity or removing yourself and your emotions. a poem is not just static, it’s meant to interact quite intimately with a reader. ada limón describes how transformative it can be leave a poem and come back to it. sometimes, the intimacy has more to do with the state of receptiveness than the text itself. poems are constantly concerned with emotional/somatic information whether you’re reading or writing them. I always explain it to myself in relationship terms, which is why it might feel impossible to build that relationship with something that seems doubly foreign

this doesn’t really stop at elementary school students. as you get older and read more poetry, you start to catch on and see that poets within a movement are effectively doing similar things, and I fear a good amount of poets are doing the same BORING or PREDICTABLE thing. (I will be nice and not name names)

it wasn't until I read a lot of poems that I noticed my favorite poems did the exact opposite.

this is one of my favorite poems everrrrr it made me write poetry bc I just wanted to do everything he did. it has also drastically shaped and informed my taste. so I will try to briefly explain how it has influenced my writing:

Let me begin this time knowing the drumming in my dreams is me inheriting the earth, is morning lighting up the rivers.

there have been weeks in my life where this line "inheriting the earth" played in my head over and over again like a mantra. "inherit" is such a loaded word, culturally and politically. I think I had been enamored by the sheer power of it, esp as a black person who has spent the majority of my life feeling unworthy of existing:

a brown child on a beach at dawn straining to see their future.

I had to sit with that feeling and characterize its meaning. for me, "inheriting the earth" immediately looked like a stampede of horses fearlessly galloping across the plains:

Let me run at break-neck speeds toward sceneries of doubt.

I could say a lot more about this poem, but moving on~

some valuable lessons I learned from being inspired by poetry: kill my pride and obliterate my quest for originality. at this point, I've embraced being a copycat:

because in my noble solitude, I have inherited nothing.

Our heads turned alongside the window, chasing a breakneck road.

I read jackson's poem up and down, left to right, tried to solve it like a rubik's cube. I wanted to turn my love for this poem into data points I could use in my own writing, but I kept hitting a wall. I couldn't shake the feeling I was stalling something inevitable, circling the truth embedded in my writing like an eagle stalking its prey. I considered the strain of the futureless brown child:

objects of my brutal childhood fascination

an instinctive deserter at the finale of my girlhood

one day I stumbled upon this article, the pieces suddenly started to come together:

as a society, we do entirely too much about youth and maintaining youth, so much to the point where the cultural obsession is perverse and the child is neglected. I only say this to offer an alternative, wherein we consider the childhood self not as a means to regain lost "purity" and powerlessness, but to take our power back. I love this article so much; I think it perfectly captures why writers are constantly fighting themselves and their words. it's evident one's learned self-consciousness and uncertainty cause someone to over-explain and impede on the poem. this makes it a matter of emotional fidelity and trust, rather than technical skill or knowledge. if poetry is inaccessible, I think it's only because we have become inaccessible to ourselves. this is what I mean when I say a good poem is "distilled", it has more to do with the clarity of the feeling you're trying to evoke or convey. it requires self-knowledge and making space for yourself to maintain emotional fidelity if that's what you want (ofc you can also evoke vagueness or uncertainty through the clarity of the form). I wondered, how can a creative know what they're doing if they don't know themselves? soon I realized at its core, the writer struggling with words was an issue of trust, on some mary oliver wild geese shit. there is a great deal of trust involved when you let yourself wonder. and sorry it's hard for me not to get all writer-brained and idealistic about this subject so please bear with me when I say I have good news, we can always find the way back to ourselves.

I think poetry should be about trusting the self and others, trust that they won't shatter the fragility of you in their closed hand. good poetry is deep intimacy and touchy-feely shit. learning how to write hurts because you’re also learning how to unlearn. it's extremely hard to teach that in a society that is more concerned with making sure you learn how to become wholly alienated from yourself (I've written extensively about how this damages the creative spirit, I'll save you the rant). in the midst of my poetry renaissance, I developed a schema around poetry in my attempts to write poems that were intimate and personal and powerful. I wanted to read stunning poetry, so I approached every poem like its intent was to pierce my heart. ofc that doesn't have to be your approach, but as someone who somewhat struggled with subtext and implicit messaging as a child, I am super into patterns that help me reach meaning. but I could only develop taste or preference through knowing myself and listening to my creative impulses, letting art and words alter my heart and my mind. it's about all that mushy gushy woo woo therapy shit. it had to be about me regifting myself a sort of agency. the resting state of a poet is precarious and sometimes contradictory. I believe in trust but I still feel the urge to over-explain myself or my thoughts for manyyy reasons. sometimes I don't even fight that urge, but the point remains. in order to teach and understand poetry, you have to know yourself (your intentions, your haunts, your beliefs, etc). in order to trust the reader, we have to trust they know themselves, or at least are willing to learn how to do it.

Reader, I should have married you sooner.