The Comedic Existence of Poetry

We all have opinions on poetry — that can’t be a controversial statement. We have opinions on everything! Yet, when it comes to poetry, many make it clear what their thoughts on the medium are, particularly contemporary poetry. Contemporary poetry is either ignored, decently enjoyed, or hated by the general populace.

“Why is the spacing like that?”

“I don’t get it.”

And don’t even get started on the topic of “instapoetry.”

Alas, here I am. A person who likes writing of all kinds. I’d always enjoyed poetry in primary and secondary schooling, but I was never big into the poetry scene nor did I like contemporary poets that much. I feel like the most contemporary poet I enjoyed when I was younger was Shel Silverstein. Like in his work, I enjoyed writing and reading poems with rhyme schemes. My favorite poems are still rhyming poems! In my higher education where I majored in English, however, was where I gained a appreciation and personal understanding of what I wanted poetry to be and found out how to engage with poetry in a way that I think many people never learn to. The last class before I changed my major to Art was a poetry workshop, which concluded on an assignment of an informal essay on poetry and a manifesto.

So here’s my opinions on poetry.

Poetry is a lot of things: Poetry is historical, with some of our most famous and oldest surviving texts being poems; poetry is playful, playing with words and conventions of typical grammar and expectations; and poetry is technical, with a whole lot of specific formats and rules to have a poem be classified as a certain type of poem. I don’t think there’s much use in trying to define poetry down to bare minimums, because there’s enough educational material out there about poetry that you could be reading instead of this.

These are my perspectives on poetry, and how I look at poetry. They don’t always apply to every poem, and they sometimes can’t all fit in one single poem. They’re what I’ve learned from learning how to enjoy poetry — and stem from what poetry I truly like. I’ll argue for my viewpoint, but I don’t really care about my horse in this race. I hope it breaks a leg and gets made into glue so that it contributes more to society than I ever will.

Poetry is the only way to explain something.

There’s many ways to look at this statement, and it’s vague for a reason. It even went through a few iterations until I condensed it down to the core idea. It’s a poetic way to begin.

Sometimes, I think, you can look at a work of art (be it writing or visual media) and say, “Hey, I get the message here.” A lot of times, though, people look at art and go:

What?

Which is completely fine and valid especially if we look at all the artists who do that on purpose. Yet, there’s times when something speaks so deeply to you, but not to your neighbor, where you have to realize that some people may never see the world in the same way you do. Consider a poem that speaks to those who’ve lost a brother, because the poet also had lost a brother and wanted to write about it (obviously). If you’ve never felt grief or loss (or maybe you don’t even have a brother), the poem might not speak to you as strongly as it does to someone who has. That someone might find that the poem speaks to them profoundly, and talks about emotions and feelings that they hadn’t been able to muster up about their experience. Maybe the poem is weird about it, but it’s specific and the person who relates really appreciates that. Others might just not understand. Some might even consider the poem offensive.

Though, perhaps grief is too cliche of an example — we will be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t understand or hasn’t experienced some form of loss in their life. Better examples that exist might be poems about gender (transitions or otherwise), sexuality, lived experiences, memories, or interests. One who loves mushrooms might write a beautifully detailed poem, but if you don’t love mushrooms, it might be nonsense. Some people find it hard to relate to certain scenarios or feelings. Imagine being an aromantic person who is surrounded by love poems!

If you don’t get a poem, maybe you just don’t get it yet. Maybe you never will. Maybe that’s a good thing. Poetry can exist to give us a window into someone else’s point of view. It could be a fictional story, or it could be a memory, but either way, the poet has created given us something that came from their mind. If you do not understand why someone might transition to another gender, a poem is one artistic way to try and understand their perspective. Reading about grief before you’ve ever really felt it may be able to prepare you to experience it when you do. Or, combine these ideas: you never know when someone you love might come out to you as LGBTQ+, and maybe a poem can give you some insight to support them.

With specific memories, sensory experiences, and particularly complex lives, you might be able to understand how poems are the only way some people can explain a topic. Humans are complex beasts, and art is a fundamental part of us. We often use art forms of any kind to elaborate the many things we feel cannot be shared easily. It’s simple to say, “hey, I’m gay,” rather than write a poem that’s several pages long about the time you realized it and accepted it, but that short, three-word statement isn’t going to give the other party much insight.

So, what about all those poems that aren’t several pages long? What about the really short ones? Well, that’s part of the beauty and strength of poetry.

Simplicity in poetry can manifest as metaphors, scenarios, or by simply (ha) having a low word count. Let me share with you one of my favorite poems as an example.

The following excerpt is from Ilya Kaminsky’s poetry book, Deaf Republic. It’s one of my favorites, notable for having a story to follow as you read through the book, and for the concept combining the experience of Deafness and of war. This is from the poem entitled “While the child sleeps, / Sonya undresses”, and these are the final words of it:

You can fuck
anyone—but with whom can you sit
in water?

The preceding rest of the poem is a scene of a couple bathing each other in a bathtub, but I find this concluding stanza so powerful that it works without context. Perhaps you already felt the context in these three lines. It’s short, it’s simple (even if you include the rest of the poem), but it says a lot. You can be sexual with anyone, but who do you truly and intimately love that you can share a bath together — or, sit in a river, a lake, a body of water — and just exist. It’s not a cliche, but it’s powerful nonetheless, which is a sign of a expertly written poem!

Cliches love to be used — it’s cheap to make a short poem out of them. However, when you make something short and memorable, and it’s not cliche — wow! It’s great. It really moves me. The entirety of Deaf Republic is also fantastic and topical for times of war. I recommend it. It’s like a little storybook as well as good contemporary poetry.

However…

...An obvious rebuttal to simplicity is the concept I mentioned in the introduction: instapoetry. This is a very contentious style in the modern era of contemporary poetry, and I’ll explain exactly why. It’s really simple: it’s short, it’s plain, and it’s basic. With the advent of social media (such as instagram, which the name references), brevity is now the soul of the really inattentive.

Social Media has caused a trend of people wanting instant gratification, short paragraphs, quick answers, and endless content to scroll past. So why wouldn’t simple, short poetry grow to immense popularity online?

Hypothetically, instapoetry could work. I mean, at it’s core, it’s short poetry that’s put in a social media format, whether that be within the confines of micro-blogging website word limits, or made aesthetically pleasing by placing the text on a graphic for an image-sharing site. Yet, return to that detail of instant gratification and quick answers… People don’t like to think, and they want things to be pretty and simple. It’s hard to make things good and simple. It’s especially hard to do it a lot in an amount that would allow people to engage in a… profitable timeframe. Whatever that means.

Because of the nature of the internet, anyone can post poetry and become big in the scene. There’s plenty of people who do what can be considered “instapoetry” that make art that’s really good, but for every piece that’s really unique and powerful, there’s tens of thousands more that are exploiting another format for some benefit — followers, views, et cetera… There’s plenty of discourse and reasons why people hate it. I suggest you seek it out yourself. I’m just going to use some popular instapoetry as examples why I dislike the trend too.

Two popular poets who are considered “instapoets” are Rupi Kaur and Nikita Gill. Let’s look at some of their poetry.

Here’s some of Nikita Gill — all of these examples are going to be short, so we’ll look at multiple poems.

Sorry — Nikita Gill
You watch her walk away
and it hits you
that she is an entire ocean
and you were wrong,
so very wrong,
because you let her go
thinking she was just a girl.

Pieces of You — Nikita Gill
Breaking off
pieces of yourself
to fit into places
will not help you belong,
it will only make you bleed.

Wolf and Woman — Nikita Gill
Some days
I am more wolf
than woman
and I am still learning
how to stop apologising
for my wild

Okay.

You can like these poems. I certainly see an appeal, but they’re definitely full of cliche and don’t offer imagery and a unique voice. They’re, like, hell — put this on some tchotchke from Hobby Lobby or something and they’ll sell like hot cakes. They appeal to a large range of people with their… vagueness.

They have metaphors, but there’s nothing to them. They just exist. A woman is compared to an ocean. I guess an ocean is good and you want that, and that makes you feel sorry for “thinking she was just a girl”. Great general “feminine empowerment” I guess. Then, a woman is more wolf sometimes, and she needs to stop apologizing for the wildside of being a wolf. Simple statement, also very relatable. Nothing creative is done with these thoughts though! They’re so boring. Why are women oceans, wolves? Describe what the women do to make them so! Even if I can’t relate exactly, it’d be more interesting to read and make the gist of the poem stronger, wouldn’t it?

And Pieces of You, if you’d forgive me for perhaps being callous, aside from the formatting, is just a fortune from a fortune cookie. Imagine it in your head. You’ve definitely gotten something similar from a chinese buffet before, right?

Now, let’s look at Rupi Kaur:

thank you - rupi kaur
look down at your body
whisper
there is no home like you

all you own is yourself - rupi kaur
let it go
let it leave
let it happen
nothing
in this world
was promised or
belonged to you
anyway

balance - rupi kaur
i thank the universe
for taking
everything it has taken
and giving to me
everything it is giving

I enjoy Rupi Kaur a single decimal point more than Nikita Gill, but it’s still all too vague. This is just a small selection but there’s a few little poems from her that give me a nugget of something that I think is almost okay. Yet the aura of “this is some copywriting to put on a #feminism product in a store” permeates. It’s slogans to me. It’s mantras for middle-aged women.

Maybe it IS the fact that Ilya Kaminsky’s stanza I love is apart of a larger work that I can divorce it from. I mean, a person’s favorite quote, whether from a book or a speaker, is usually apart of a larger piece too! When I read these instapoems, I find myself going… that’s all you have to say to me? I want to read a creative work of art, not be sold slogans and little statements of empowerment. I could use some good, relatable words in my life, but I’ve not found them with typical displays of womanhood or widely-renown artists anyways, so I do remind myself that “I’m not the target audience here.” I don’t get these poems — well, actually, I do… but I think that they are far from what I think is truly helpful for someone who needs the subject matter.

I’ve read a few arguments about the instapoetry debacle.

“There’s a reason!”

“We should be aware of people’s tastes.”

“They work great for accessibility.”

These are popular, accessible (in that they’re easy to relate to, and are on public-access social medias), and short. It’s a great introduction to poems. I do agree that there’s something to be said about why these poems are popular. I’ve thought about them. I’ve determined that they’re REALLY not for me, and the reasons they’re popular are the same reasons I once didn’t really enjoy poetry either.

Accessibility means a lot of things, and I don’t even think that having things:
1) freely available on the internet, and
2) simple,
means that it is inherently accessible and beneficial. Hello, poetryfoundation.org and poets.org exist and you can read a lot of different types of poems on there. Hell, it’s probably more accessible on those sites. I don’t think screen-readers could read out the words of aesthetic instagram poem images unless there was a (good) alt tag associated.

(I don’t want to think about the complexities of trying to translate poetic form to screen-readers, but I am now where I hadn’t previously).

In short, the first tenant of my beliefs about the fundamental nature of poetry is that it’s a creative way to say something. If it’s simple and it works, it’s a delicate balance of thoughtfulness and feeling and word choice. If it’s long and creative and confusing, then it’s a complex way to examine something. You just have to do it right.

Poetry is details.

This concept is one where I would argue that it is one of the most fundamental concepts of any type of poetry. However, with the many types of poetry that exist, I’m sure someone could counterargue and point out a technique that doesn’t require details, but I’ll bet it’s hard. Writing IS details! What is any art without details!? Even the most minimalist art has details — and the lack of details is inherently a detail, is it not!?

Anyways.

Poetry is details. Poetry can be like a photograph. Countless lines tell of a particular moment in time, like poems about childhood or romance or death. Poetry attempts to capture moments of clarity, where a person seems to step outside of reality for a moment. Maybe they realize something beautiful, or ugly, or just new about the universe. Maybe they disassociate from themselves and see outside. Maybe the moment is just an important one, to them.

A sniff of a memory long since past. Grandmother's house. Sterile medical equipment that keeps him alive. Feeding time. A chemo room and an airplane.

Details help distinguish a poem from a conversation with your mother about how you’re gay. Details imply work and mastery over words, which is poetry. Details are the meat of a sandwich, and everything else like technique and form and what paper you’re printing on are the bread.

Here’s a quote from me, from that one final poetry assignment I mentioned in the introduction. I’m quoting myself, so I don’t need any sort of citations, but it’s also… past me, so I will use quotation marks and format it as if it were someone else — but this is a piece about poetry, not metaphysics, alright?

I had written:

“There has always been a bit of my rebellious nature that hates the insistence that rhyming is bad, and that conciseness is key. Of course, the part that knows and loves to understand the reasoning behind conventions gets why this is: eventually rhyming will just recycle the same thing over and over and be predictive, and just telling people to not do it is a way to get more out of a populace that only seems to equate poetry with rhyming.”

As you can see, this… is not about details. This is me right off the tail-end of insulting Ezra Pound, which is cool and good because he’s one of the dominos in the Rube Goldberg machine that led to Cats: the Musical existing. But, yes, this excerpt is about rhyming as a technique within poetry. But rhyming is an important aspect of poetry, as well as a type of detail.

Rhyming (and rhythm) is oft used in techniques and forms of poetry. It’s also definitely true that in poetic writing workshops/classes/projects that banning rhyme is a great way for people to think about the details more than the word choice. Restrictions are generative. However, I’ve found that in many subjects, educators tend to not want to answer the why of why we have to do things.

The “why” is important to me, always. I am the type of person to look at rules and restrictions and ask “why?” and if the answer is stupid to me, I will hate the rule. I do 100% understand the need to force people to be creative and detail-orientated and step back from rhyming. But also, hey! Once they do get that, they should try to go back to integrating rhyming techniques if they want to. It’s a detail. Consider the purpose of it. Remake a poem you made without rhyming scheme but now use a rhyming scheme! How does it change. How hard is it? As with any good detail, you just have to put thought into it.

I had concluded that poetic essay with this excerpt:

“Purpose is the thing, I think. Each act, every word, every choice in a poem needs a purpose. From the line breaks to rhyming and words choice to, fuck – even the font choice, I think! All has its purpose. [..] Poetry is not just images, poetry is not just rhyme schemes. Poetry is micromanagement and precision and purpose, and that’s what makes this art mine.”

Why did I have the balls to curse in my college poetry assignment? That’s university for you.

This is the point of bringing up rhyming… and also word choice, technique, form, font type, color, choice of paper, anything. The devil’s in the details. He wants you to not think about them, as do the ad companies and the writers of a business’s terms of service.

Poetry is micromanagement and precision and purpose. Poetry is details. Details require thought.

Details are everything. To poetry, to comedy… To songs, to prose, to scripts, to copywriting and education and history and industry. Give the people a little meat to chew on! It’s okay. I think the world needs to slow down a little anyways.

Maybe we ought to study the fine print of subscriptions and social media like they’re poetry. Question its existence. Question why this is here. Question what it means for you.

Poetry and Comedy exist by the same principles.

Poetry has always served a purpose through time. The simple, modern, quick and succinct instapoetry serves the purpose of being easy and digestible for an age of scrolling and an infinitely burning need for consumption. Before writing, verse and rhyme were a mnemonic device so that tales could travel and live even without physical record. Songs stick with us in the same way a couplet is easy to remember. Details, stories, and creativity are not just traits of poetry. Songwriting is an obvious sibling, but I posit that there is another cousin: Comedy.

This is something I realized early on, and ties into the previous section on details. If poetry is about details, then it is created in the same way a really great comedy set is made. Consider some of your favorite comedy bits, sets, stories… This concept might not apply to every type of comedy you like, but it is still something to consider. Think about how the comedian utilizes details and imagery. Imagery, of course, is one of the more obvious poetic staples. Detailed images, exaggeration, getting the audience into a scenario… those apply both to poetry and comedy.

A comedian I enjoy uses metaphors and similes heavily. The comparison is made between a completely normal event to something you do not expect, but then upon seeing it in your head, a perfectly vivid image is created that makes you laugh because you’ve never thought to compare the two — that’s comedy. An example could be “Yo’ Mama” jokes. Yo’ mama so __, she needs/has/does __. People can get pretty creative in their comparisons and scenarios. That’s just a very general example, though. Try thinking about it next time you listen to a comedian you like!

Comedians appeal to audiences. The audience is so important to comedy because people’s ideas of what’s funny varies from generation to generation, and is influenced by individual characteristics like background, job, life experiences, age, et cetera… They all determine whether or not you find a joke funny. If you get invited to a show by your friend, and you go there, and the room is uproariously dying and wheezing from the bits and humor on stage but you’re stuck in your seat silent, wondering what is so funny, then you and your friend seem to have very different ideas of humor. Obviously, someone thinks this is funny. Just… not you.

Either a comedian fills the room with laughter, or they cause a woman to stick her nose up in the air and say, “kids these days! I just don’t get their humor.” While that woman might have come for the comedian, the comedian obviously did not come there for her. They have an audience. The details show it: the rest of the room’s laughing.

Now think about poetry.

Poems either really speak to you and you understand them, or you don’t understand and they make you wonder what on earth other people are thinking when they praise it. Why are all those academic MFAs or PHD poets in love with this!? Art is funny like that, in that there’s an audience for the creation somewhere out in the world. It's just that it is definitely not you.

Poems are full of devices like metaphors and comparisons, and the best ones are usually pretty unique and out-there with the concepts of how they’re comparing apples to the Geneva Conventions. They don’t have to be without cliche, but they do usually really get you to feel an emotion when they work. Maybe the emotion isn’t strong, but it makes you consider and think a lot — that counts!

Now, let’s look at a poem that’s also a joke.

The One About the Robbers - Zachary Schomburg
You tell me a joke about two robbers who hide from the police. One robber hides as a sack of cats and the other robber hides as a sack of potatoes. That is the punch line somehow, the sack of potatoes, but all I can think about is how my dad used to throw me over his shoulder when I was very small and call me his sack of potatoes. I’ve got a sack of potatoes he would yell, spinning around in a circle, the arm not holding me reaching out for a sale. Does anyone want to buy my sack of potatoes? No one ever wanted to buy me. We were always the only two people in the room.

I really like Zachary Schomburg’s work, and this one is great. I also recommend several poems out of his book The Man Suit, which was my introduction to him. He does a lot of prose poetry, which is exemplified by the above poem, and I think it adds to it feeling like a comedy bit.

Obviously, this one in particular is using a common joke set-up as the subject, so feels even more so like a joke, because it’s about a joke. But it’s more than a joke, and those other bits make it a poem. Sure, it’s a joke, but then it evolves (not devolves, despite feeling like that) into more.

“...but all I can think about is…” He’s going off on a tangent about how the joke makes him think of a memory of him and his dad alone, playing around. It feels wanting, nostalgic, and goes back into the quality of fine imagery. As I read this, I can perfectly see a scene in my head. It turns from just words into a vingent of familial bonding. It zooms out to show that the father and the son, the sack of potatoes lying on the father’s shoulder, are the only people in the room. What kind of room do you imagine, if you’re the type of person who sees images clear in their mind? What do you think that means?

The Conclusion.

I think in the time that’s passed since beginning this essay, I’ve found out what I really think. Between writing sessions I’ve thought and engaged with things that helped me reach my a-ha! moment on how I really feel about poetry—what I like and what I don’t. I’m not going to tell you what I see when I read The One About the Robbers because of this thesis: the world needs to think a bit more deeply, more critically on things, on their own terms.

My friend had a video essay on, and because we live together, I tend to also watch what they watch. We have similar enough tastes in videos that I’ve never really felt the need to leave out of annoyance of the content. This video in particular was by a teenage girl about booktok. I have no interest in tiktok, for various reasons, but I know of things by cultural osmosis or reposting the clips or whatever. I’ve heard of booktok.

Man, have I heard of booktok.

The video is entitled “booktok, brainrot, and why it’s okay to be a hater” by alisha not alihsha, which makes me want to express sympathies to the author for having one’s name so misspelled so often that they made it their online handle.

I don’t know that many popular “booktok” or general authors of the modern era. I’ve kind of fell off of being in-the-know when I started reading books for more non-fiction or academic reasons. Life is busy! However, I found as I listened to this video by someone in the generation after me, that it spoke really closely to my thoughts on a lot of things, especially this little write up. It’s not very little anymore. I had too much fun being a hater… just a little bit.

After watching the video, I realized I feel similar about contemporary poetry.

A large problem that I believe persists throughout life right now is that people don’t really know what the word “critical” means, especially seen in the phrase “critical thinking”. Hell, I think about how in middle school I had a “critical thinking” class for first period, and it was just another buzzword term to replace homeroom. We didn’t do anything beside homework or whatever.

To be critical is to simply look at things deeply. You analyze, you poke and prod, and you think beyond the work itself. You ask why! If you’d ever heard people express sadness at how older children (and adults) lose the ability to ask why, that’s apart of it. I don’t think people have taught them properly, or they’ve lost some wonder in the act of thinking about something for more than fifteen seconds. “Being a hater” is just one of the many ways being critical is pushed away as being a killjoy or unfun or “the other”. I assure you that I do believe Alisha is using the phrase to get those who most need to hear her thoughts hooked into a hip new video essay.

It’s not only okay to be “a hater”, it’s fun! Criticalness is fun! Critical doesn’t even have to be negative! You just have to have some sort of reasoning behind your understanding of the thing you’re looking at. Looking at poetry, being critical and a “hater” of some of my examples in this essay is fun! I got to think hard about why. I got to do something I liked (write). I got to learn and discover! Isn’t it wonderful!? Isn’t it great?

And beyond that, I think limiting oneself to what’s easy or what’s safe will just keep you away from better things that also fit your interests! Poetry is hard because it’s trying to pick a perfect strawberry out of a field of thousands, and a lot of those strawberries are already mushy. But when you find that strawberry — firm, juicy, and delicious — it is great! And maybe it’ll lead you to more good strawberries on that plant.

I don’t really know about the horticulture of strawberries, sorry. It’s just a metaphor.

I also came across an article entitled “The “Disney adult” industrial complex” which is about how the corporate entity has turned their fans into life long consumers that are always living their life in a way that Disney would approve of like it’s some sort of cyberpunk novel. Insert the edit of the Pirates of the Caribbean meme.

I like fairy tales and romantic things—but the original stories that Disney has appropriated and made “family friendly” (by their definition) were never really quite friendly! Fairy tales were macabre and full of a lot of hard-hitting lessons for their audiences. Some of them spoke to conventions of the time and would need to be adjusted for a modern audience, sure, but to water them down so much that popular culture has forgotten its history in favor of the whims of a corporation is kind of depressing.

If you kept following the whims of what a more powerful entity was giving you, you’d never discover what you might also possibly enjoy! Think about how much a company would love if you just accepted the most bare bones art and never thought critically about it.

This essay kind of became something more than I expected. I learned things. It took a long time. It gestated and grew and got tattoos and piercings and colored hair, y’know? It became — maybe — a little more than about poetry. But that’s poetry for you, I guess. It’s funny, it’s detailed, and it’s what it needs to be by order of its creator. I hope you’ll try to look at the next poem you read a bit more closely than you had previously.

But what do I know? This entire essay was just supposed to be a joke.

Anyways great timing with Taylor Swift’s new album or whatever amirite everybody woo yeah!?

References

Nikita Gill's Instagram / Poetry

Rupi Kaur's Instagram / Poetry

Zachary Schomburg's The One About the Robbers

“booktok, brainrot, and why it’s okay to be a hater” by alisha not alihsha

The "Disney adult" industrial complex by Amelia Tait