Letters From a Young (Female) Poet

Any argument about poetry is one worth having. So it’s been equally thrilling and disappointing to see recent debates decrying the proliferation of “artless” poetry in a market irrevocably changed by social media. A particularly scathing review of Hollie McNish’s Plum has now further inflamed the debate. Rebecca Watts’s article in the PN Review’s latest issue has inspired some heated responses. There isn’t much in the original piece that hasn’t been written or insinuated before, especially concerning the poet Rupi Kaur’s meteoric rise. If I had a bitcoin for every time I heard social media is dumbing us down, I could buy shares in Amazon. What really caught my attention, however, was something else; the refashioning of a longstanding brand of exclusivity as a minority position. Repeating age-old prejudices while casting oneself as a beleaguered truth-teller is truly a feat to behold. As an admittedly “young female poet” hell-bent on destroying poetry, I felt it was only right to respond to the sentiment behind Watts’s piece.

I write poems. Sometimes I get paid for them. Sometimes I read them and get paid for that too. Sometimes they are published months later in a journal or magazine or anthology and I get paid for this too. Yes, there termed the “aesthetics of redemption.” For some people, that means a solipsist Instagram sound-bite of a poem that appeals to both the specific alienation of young women of color and the common experiences of a wider audience. For some people, that’s enough. This is what they need to get through their day. For many, this is what they choose to enjoy in whatever little leisure time they have amidst the generally intolerable conditions that make up their daily lives. This generates a lot of attention/readership/money for Instagram poets, who become symbols of everything that is wrong with audiences and not everything that is wrong with the conditions of this world. As Watts argues, cults of personality are constructed around these young women. But we already have a wealth of personality cults within the Poetry (with a capital P) world. Except we call it a canon. Our personality cults are endorsed through policy and propaganda and have been as globally exported as any post with thousands of likes.