Just Because You Don’t Like It Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Poetry
Reconsidering the merits of Instapoetry
Poetry has a massive inferiority complex. There is no literary genre more obsessed with justifying its own existence, telling us what it is, what it isn’t, why it is important, and how we are supposed to read and understand it. Why Poetry Matters, Can Poetry Matter, What is Poetry, How to Read a Poem, the list of book titles goes on.
It’s no wonder so few people are willing to bother. Who wants reading material so difficult to enjoy that you need a how-to manual to appreciate it?
Poetry is a numbers game. It takes tremendous patience. This is not a scientific estimate (though the numerical specificity will make it sound like one), but you probably won’t care at all for something like 99.7% of the poems you read. Many of them, you will actively dislike. You will find them intentionally opaque, pretentiously academic, or just plain boring. And this from a person who devotes hours to writing poems and actually reads those what, why, and how-to poetry books. Why? I’m hooked on the 0.03% that work. Because when poems work, they really work.
I look for poems that use accessible, economical language to artfully communicate universal truths. A favorite example is the opening line of The Clearing by Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.
Deep in the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can be reached only by someone who has lost his way….
It’s simple and direct. The vocabulary is unchallenging. Informal use of the contraction there’s adds to the offhand conversational tone. At the same time, it is deeply expressive. It’s poetry to live your life by. It advocates wisely for courage, perseverance, self-belief, and depending on your interpretation, spiritual faith in troubled times—all in just twenty words, only one of which contains more than two syllables.
Even more impressively, it walks a tightrope between profoundness and cliché that is enormously challenging to achieve. If you don’t believe me, give it a try sometime. I think of those who would look skeptically at a Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko painting for the first time and naively say, “Even I could do that.” No, you couldn’t.
Much has been written about a strain of mostly social media-based poetry, popularized by Instapoets like R.M. Drake and Rupi Kaur among others, that attempts a similar style. They write short, straightforward poems with relatable emotional themes. Here’s a sample poem by Rupi Kaur called female friendships.
the women in my life
raised me to new heights
back when i didn’t have the confidence
to look myself in the eye
they saw the best version of me
and helped me see her too
As with the Transtromer poem, the word choice is simple, only one word beyond two syllables. There is a similar informal tone (e.g., didn’t vs. did not), and the message is universally human.
So, what are the important differences between these two poems? What is it that, at least in my eyes, sets them worlds apart?
First, let me acknowledge the fact that as a male reader, I am not the target audience for the Kaur poem, but that does not preclude the possibility of empathizing with or gaining insight from the speaker. I wrote previously about Natasha Trethewey’s Blond, a poem written from the perspective of biracial girl that drew me deeply into its world, despite the ethnographic differences between the speaker and myself.
In the Transtromer poem, there is a subtle sense of mystery. There are metaphors, and it is up to the reader to interpret them. We are challenged to fill in a few blanks. What do the forest and the unexpected clearing represent? The reader is free to decide, in keeping with their own life experience. It’s a poem that asks more questions than it answers.
The language in the Kaur poem is entirely literal. There is nothing to interpret, and therefore, little to think deeply about. When it does ask questions, it relies on clichéd expressions to ask them (e.g., new heights and the best version of me). Is it even poetry? To my ear, it reads more like a greeting card.
On the other hand, there’s a cerebral coldness to the Transtromer poem—an emotional detachment. It speaks of solitude and standing at the crossroads of an existential crisis. By contrast, the entire purpose of the Kaur poem, it seems to me, is to reach out openly and warmly toward human connection. The language used, whether you deem it artful or not, places no barriers between the hearts of the speaker and her readers.
It is an entirely subjective matter whether a poem, or any piece of art, is “good” or not. The appeal of online poets like Rupi Kaur is their capacity to quickly establish an emotional connection between speaker and reader. Success on social media is about capturing attention with a message that resonates immediately. Forcing a reader to slow down, ask questions, and analyze language beyond identification of a singular theme is contrary to their intent. It may not be what I look for in poetry, but I would reject any suggestion that it isn’t poetry, represents a lesser poetry, or that it lacks merit of its own. That kind of talk only serves to divide us, to separate us into opposing camps, populist vs. traditionalist, accessible vs. academic, or whatever, and personally, I’m not interested in joining any of those teams. Telling someone their poetry isn’t real poetry is dogmatic in the vein of a religious extremist denouncing you for worshipping a false god.
Poetry, if anything, should stand for defiance of such division. It should connect us to the universal. To quote John Keats, poetry “should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Whether, as a culture, we emphasize the value of deep reflection and critical thinking enough (I would argue we do not) is a separate question worth discussing, but in an increasingly AI-sloppified culture, apparently hell-bent on abandoning human connection at every new technological turn, we need as many direct lines to intimacy, empathy, and togetherness as we can get.