Oh good timing, I've been writing poetry for the first time ever for the past week. Not about to share it anywhere.
But, they both look like mostly honest perspectives from particular types of people.
I see the first one and think of all the out of touch HS teachers I had who were so convinced their class was important and they were going to teach me an important life lesson and save me from underachieving by being hard on me in some way (usually being super strict on deadlines, or the guy who let me turn in my test with the back side not complete and didn't tell me or let me retry for partial credit - both my fault, but they taught me nothing). They had no concern for the fact I was just trying to get through the day. They just saw someone with potential who needed to learn from their mistakes by being held accountable. But I had missed deadlines in every class I ever took since middle school, if I could have just taught myself executive functioning and how to have a stable home life, I would have.
The second reminds me of a lot of some of my friends. They are anxious wrecks, obsessesing over the news constantly, meanwhile compulsively using social media to make calls for action and bring important things that they can't really actually impact to light. All the while, their personal life and mental health is a wreck, which they also loudly proclaim on social media.
So I think both poems were great insights into those perspectives. It's just that those perspectives are not exactly interesting and are sometimes a bit annoying.
Both poems could be read as satires of exactly the type of people you describe and I think that would that would cause them to wrap around and be good again. And I'm not entirely sure what to think of that— it's simultaneously an example of how works can't really be divorced from the context in which they were created, but also an example of "the art" being created in the space between the author and the reader.
It reminds me of https://poets.org/poem/antigonish-i-met-man-who-wasnt-there where in-context the poem is mediocre. But without the context it's really good, it conjures in your mind all kinds of strange interpretations.
The core point is halfway down: only bad poems go viral on Twitter, because Twitter's design means the most "successful" posts are those that encourage flamewars. Twitter is to social media as League of Legends is to videogames.
I think "almost all poems are bad poems" is more like it.
My wife was talking to me the other day about how "all the poems in the New Yorker are bad." I think the last contemporary poet that I liked was Charles Bukowski [1] but even as a (not quite super) fan I think you don't need more than a copy of Post Office (an early novel of his) and one volume of his poems because from beginning to end his poems were about drinking alcohol, taking care of his cats, loose women, and gambling at the track.
I used to measure my level of boredom by how tempted I was to read the poems in the New Yorker. I finally brought myself to read the fiction, at least.
Even as a short story fan, I haven't been impressed by the New Yorker's fiction lately, but there's good stuff in the archives. And the occasional new George Saunders piece, which tend to be pretty good, if not great.
The fiction comes across as "post-woke white folks who want to read like Haruhi Murakami" which isn't too bad because it is "post-woke" (e.g. has a little bit of self-awareness)
For your interest and consideration, Twue Vogon Poetry.
Written by a mining billionaire, attached to a 30 tonne rock, dropped outside central HQ, entirely serious, completely unaware, mere conventions of speeling, granma, and sensibility tossed asunder.
Enjoy (?) https://www.businessinsider.com/everyone-is-laughing-at-aust...
Damn, I've barely even caught up with woke.
Bad at what?
I agree most poetry is bad at hitting my subjective quality markers, at tickling my sense of sophistication and meaning. I don't even like the majority of poetry from poets that I love. I fell in love with Cummings as a teenager and checked out his collected works and realized quickly that while I found some transcendent (and worth the slog through what wasn't), I also found the majority of the work of one of the most famous 20th C poets pretty meh.
Even for those who can outrace Sturgeon's Law (which I think Cummings achieved), it's an art, not or science, hit or miss. And alongside issues of quality, skill, and probability of hits there will also always be subjectivity in how a work hits each member of an audience.
Still... bad for what? As well as being an art, poetry is a humanity. The two chord punk rock song is definitely doing less and less sophisticated things than a Palestrina motet or even Steve Reich's studies in subtly changing simplicity and we lose something when we can't appreciate sophistication and intricacy (with or without being able to articulate the specifics). But we also lose something when we can't appreciate simple expression even with mediocre articulation.
Bad poems are probably doing something well enough alongside being bad at meeting various standards.
Well if none of the good ones go viral, that's the perception being pushed.
When I was 10 I wrote my first poem for a class assignment. It was worse than you might expect. The problem is that my teacher entered it into a statewide contest and it got published on the cover of a statewide distributed poetry book. I have a friend who still quotes from it in wonder. I was mortified and it was also the last poem I ever wrote. But my poetry publishing batting average is 1.000.
“… most of the best painting I've ever seen were put on the refrigerator with a magnet. And I think most of us, maybe all of us, when we're three, four, five, six, seven we can all - we're all artists, we all have that thing. And in a lot of people it gets pounded out of you, or you, you know, the adult part of your mind tells you to drop that …” - John Lurie, Painting with John, “Bob Ross Was Wrong”
Oh, please share it!
That would violate the eighth amendment and the geneva convention.
Ah, I see. Poetry à la the Vogons.
> Few of Twitter's most vocal posters spend time reading contemporary poetry collections, attending readings, or tracing the evolution of forms.
I recently got hooked into contemporary (i.e. modern) poetry. I fully understand why modern poetry seems hard to understand.
I believe most people innately love simple and deep modern poems. If you like poetry related to nature (sorry major typo!), check out Ada Limon (1) If you like poetry related to medicine and life, check out ACP poetry prize (2)
Things are what they are. And what we make of them, really.
Poetry is art, and art is inherently subjective. Someone's trash is someone else's beautiful work of art. Indeed, I think, with time, I have been able to appreciate art as an art form (in the way it conveys a message, or requires some particular effort or technique, etc) and art as something that simply...touches someone in some way.
So I've found the best poetry to be terrible, and the worst poetry to be incredible. And everything in between. Who am I to truly judge what is good or bad? By which I mean: who is anyone to truly judge what is good or bad? If people find beauty in or are touched by some piece of art (even if the author did not intend it as art), then it is something worthy of that designation — a good piece of art. I guess this is somewhat of a hot take, but it is what it is — just another _thing_. While we're on the topic of things, here is one such other thing — a(n arguably bad) poem on those dastardly things:
Things (09/01/2025)
A thing is what a thing
ought not to be to us.
It ought not to be anything,
other than the thing it was.
If it becomes something different,
then it was never something.
And, then, it knows it's indifferent
— for it knows not it's a thing.
We know not of it, either
— how can we be sure it is?
Could it not just be a fever,
or another thing like this?
I pay no mind to such things,
nor do I pay any feelings.
In fact, I pay no mind to anything
— and isn't that quite the thing?Feels like "Signaling a Political Ingroup" is enough of a signal to explain all of these examples?
Not that I don't think they aren't also trying at the other points. I think they are over explaining, though.
> One caveat: the six triggers are, importantly, specific to Twitter. On Instagram—where a poem might pop up accompanied by a coffee cup or pen artfully in frame, as well as watercolor or pen-and-ink illustrations—even terrible verse rarely provokes vitriol. This stark difference suggests our relationship to art is increasingly shaped by the architectural affordances of the social platforms where we encounter it.
I believe this is the point they’re ultimately making.
I don't really disagree with that. I'm just challenging that many of those points are how people signal to their in crowd.
Also notable that twitter, specifically, is overwhelmingly signalling to the crowd. I think this has been true for a long time, but it does feel that it is more extreme now.
My guess is that this would be a more constructive argument against algorithms driving engagement. They are overwhelmingly hijacked by in group signals in ways that curated data, oddly, was not. Not that curation always worked, mind. You could build up more trust that curators at least put some reputation on the line with regards to other factors.
> Also notable that twitter, specifically, is overwhelmingly signalling to the crowd. I think this has been true for a long time, but it does feel that it is more extreme now.
There is an interesting positive feedback loop:
1. Some people's messages are intended to be in-group signals and others' are not.
2. Because of the former, people sometimes intepret the latter as implicitly signally membership in the opposing group.
3. Once people start making that interpretation, they start using that deliberately, so now messages that don't look like group signals do look like group signals for the other group.
Eventually, the result is that nearly all messages are tribal markers and it's nearly impossible to say anything that isn't just a shibboleth.
There's something to be said about a psychic and her massages.
I think the form thing is more the issue. These "poems" are not poems. They are prose. Bad prose, but prose. They have no structure, and poetry is structure, that is what makes it poetry. The constraints are what make it interesting and sometimes good.
The other issue is vocabulary. The "poems" shown here show their authors' very limited vocabularies. Say something interesting within a constrained structure using interesting language and imagery and you have good poetry. Trite sentiments expressed in "free verse" using ordinary words you would find in any random tweet or blog post or casual conversation, with no imagery? It is so pretentious to call it poetry.
Ah, that is attacking what makes these bad poems, as it were? I was more looking at the "go viral" part and feel that is explained enough by the signaling point. Not just in what the alleged poem itself may signal, but what criticizing or praising it will signal.
lmao the author specifically calls you, yes you, out in the post:
> Talky free verse, prose poetry, or spoken word—while seemingly accessible—can also upset readers whose major exposure to poetry was through high school English. The absence of traditional markers they studied in class, like end-rhyme or meter, becomes instant evidence that something is “not real poetry” for this perpetually precocious crowd.
I thought this was half sarcasm when I read it, but no, here you are, in the comments.
Yes I read the same post. What I said remains true. "Talky free verse" and "prose poetry" are misnomers. They aren't poetry.
It has nothing to do with what I "studied in class". Words have definitions and "poetry" is meaningless if it means "anything written down at all".
We've been searching for the bounds of art, poetry, and music, for millennia without any hope of definition or finality. Thankfully HN user milesrout figured it out. That's a load off my mind.
The article has forgotten how it feels to be young and impressionable, has forgotten the face of its father:
> What's lost in this shift from private contemplation to public performance is the slow work of developing aesthetic judgment.
This pairing of poem and criticism is an important step towards aesthetic judgement. It raises difficult questions. They think it's stupid. Do I? Do I because they told me not to like it? How does it make me feel?
Written poetry all my life, of varying badness. Have never had the ear or the talent for music though and – unfortunately – always felt I wanted to write “songs” not “poems.” Since 2017, I’ve been trying to “set my poems to music” using the machine. Started with my own algos in 2017, got going in earnest in 2020 with openAI’s jukebox; then last year a friend turned me to Suno.
Take the first poem talked about in OP’s article and one of the comments: “humans working hard to prove that they can make art that’s somehow even worse than AI slop.” I see this sort of comment a lot and I’m not saying that’s wrong at all – undoubtedly the vast vast majority of AI “content” is truly “slop.”
But I’ve also believed that genAI could be thought of like an instrument. Most music played on a piano or a synth or a guitar is slop; but it undoubtedly allows for music to be made that would otherwise not exist. I hope the same can be said of Suno (or whatever – hopefully opensourced alternative - follows).
And here’s one of my attempts, a song about the ethics of making music with the machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w5HBrMenZM
Vogon poetry?
The overwhelming majority (well over 99%) of poems are bad, so it's not surprising that viral poems are also bad.
I kind of liked both poems. I suppose I should feel wrong for liking "inherently" bad poems.
What specifically do you like about them?
In both cases I personally found the sentiment trite, the structure nonexistent, the vocabulary limited, and the imagery anemic, so I am curious to hear a different perspective.
I think the two of us are on opposite sides of the "These elements include:" list :)
"Laundry to do..." is a trauma dump for pretty much everyone in this third decade of 24/7 local/global disaster reporting. It's the opposite of a unique perspective. But, it's nice to see the common vent presented in a thoughtful way instead of the daily routine of "Everyone holding it in and a few people explosively word-vomiting frustration."
And, I don't need rigid structure, impressive vocab or flowery images to appreciate a message. I'm good with it just putting me in a moment. Feeling it. Taking a breath and exhaling "yessssss......"
>"Laundry to do..." is a trauma dump
This used to be called a whinge. It wasn't celebrated. I wrote out a longer reply but ... idk, I'm astonished at the idea that that "poem" is "presented in a thoughtful way" instead of being "explosive word vomit" when "explosive word vomit" is, as yet, the most accurate three-word description of it I have seen so far. And the idea that the "daily routine" is "Everyone holding it in" is just mad. I can see why people say we exist in a post-fact world where people are speaking past one another. From my perspective nobody has held it in less than people today, over matters so trivial and misunderstood. People cry on Twitter over someone not wearing a mask on public transport, yet people went to the trenches and saw 90% of the male inhabitants of their village killed in front of them and held it together for King and country, went back home and lived normal lives. And the ones that wrote poetry about it wrote actual poetry, good poetry. Not this tat.
>And, I don't need rigid structure, impressive vocab or flowery images to appreciate a message. I'm good with it just putting me in a moment
That doesn't make it a poem!
I wouldn’t feel too bad. Part of the criticism is the poems are effective at pushing our emotional buttons (which is uncool to the sophistos.)
But I’d also encourage you to think about the deeper meaning. Is “if you don’t enjoy writing papers, you aren’t enjoying life” really a fair assessment? Does mixing your mundane life with confronting genocide give the appropriate respect to such a weighty topic?
> Does mixing your mundane life with confronting genocide give the appropriate respect to such a weighty topic?
That's why I like this poem. In its stream-of-consciousness way, it points out that we are unable to give that topic the respect it deserves because we don't have the luxury of escaping all of the other mundanities of our life.
Some of those tweet criticisms gets the side eye from me:
> People seem to not realize that poetry isn't just a thing you can do. It requires knowledge of form and structure, and of course some amount of talent
It's very much just a thing that you can do. Doing it well may be an art, but simply doing it is a humanity.
"Knowledge of form and structure" is a pretty circular standard, like many aesthetic standards. Form and structure become established by becoming established forms and structures -- matters of meter and certain symmetries may have something of a longer standing but the sonnet isn't a cosmic constant. Form is arguably one of the cheaper ways of making poetry.
Brilliance among post-structural poets is uncontroversial at this point. Authors like Wendell Berry might make a case for the use of old forms (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/18/wendell-berry-poet... ) and that's certainly worth understanding for practitioners of the arts of words or living, but that doesn't mean everything else isn't poetry (as Berry himself implicitly acknowledges in his own poetry).
Talent helps but sometimes you build up talent. Most people aren't Keats or Cummings from the get go.
> they fail to appreciate that the sentiments it expresses are also hackneyed and trite
So are sunsets and love.
I appreciate novelty and sophistication as much as the next guy, maybe more. I can even see not thinking these poems are particularly "good" by some set of aesthetic standards and I might even be interested in that kind of criticism.
But I also understand that what art is for is bigger than living up to that. To quote Ursula K Le Guin:
> I want to revalue the word "art" so that when I come back as I do now to talking about words it is in the context of the great arts of living, of the woman carrying the basket of bread, bearing gifts, goods. Art not as some ejaculative act of ego but as a way, a skillful and powerful way of being in the world.
I don't think the Krishnan laundry genocide poem is good poetry, but ... good for what? It was good at getting something out of the author, it was good at speaking to the divide between knowledge of a high profile horror and the work of every day living, and for touching on that feeling among readers.
The fact that it doesn't hit my various aesthetic / form markers is orthogonal to that.
Title made me think of the WC Williams “This Is Just To Say”/icebox plums poem that took over Twitter for a while because it was formulaic in an exploitable meme way.
It would be fun to take this author’s formula and have a worst-viral poem writing contest.
Where can we see this "Bad Apple played on the NYPD farmer's market"? I only found "Bad Apple played on apples": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywy-OwHejfs