People listen to “bad” music, watch “bad” movies and TV, eat fast food, drink cheap wine and play bad video games. It’s wonderful and is part of what gives life richness and joy.
We don’t get joy out of things based some unknown expert’s opinion, but our own experience.
Read and write your bad poetry. Sing your favourite songs. Read a garbage novel. Enjoy yourself.
And if you think your superior taste entitles you to judge someone else, I have a bad poem for you:
Roses are red
Violeta are blue
Fuck the high horse you rode in on
And fuck you too
[deleted] on
[removed]
YesStupidQuestions1 on
This reminds me of my dad looking down on fantasy books because I didn’t want to read Will Smith’s autobiography
thriftstorepaperback on
Tbh it would be extremely irritating as a poet to put work into your craft and try to say something interesting/in a new way, and then get completely outshone by some generic post-breakup advice with line breaks thrown in randomly.
Also I don’t get the defensive comments – the article criticized the style and gave possible reasons for it getting so popular. Nowhere did it say the readers of this stuff are inferior to readers of more critically acclaimed poetry.
chop_pooey on
Meh, I dont really care if people enjoy Rupi Kaur. My niece asked me for Milk and Honey for Christmas one year so I got her that and also bought her a copy of one of Terrance Hayes books of poetry. Idk if she ever read the Hayes book, but if Rupi Kaur sparked her interest in poetry then she has more of a chance to read it than if she hadn’t gotten interested
battle-thug on
If anybody knows where bad writing is, it’s Vice.
darth_bader_ginsburg on
huge problem in media consumption right now: people feel the need for their tastes to “be right” or make them look smart, so they get on the internet and try to justify mid writing as literature.
the only real problem with “bad poetry,” which the article touches on, is when it becomes so basic it crosses over into plagiarism and just reiterates to the reader the same ideas they already know in an infinite loop. i think we’ll see a lot more of that kind of writing as AI becomes more popular.
you can like something and also know that it’s of medium-to-poor quality. something can be “good for my social media post” and not “good.” people just hate being transparent on social media and they hate admitting that they either aren’t too well read or prefer a high-school-level writing style. so it NEEDS to be “good poetry,” and then we get this style of thinkpiece article every 8 months or so.
MhiCyko on
bro there has to be more factors when it comes to this but I think its getting harder to find “good” poetry, art, etc. simply due to oversaturation. you can either choose to keep looking or be satisfied with what you found.
cheesecheesecheesec on
I like Coleridge and Shel Silverstein. My exposure to poetry doesn’t go past that, but I think I might like reading more of the greats.
zeroHEX3 on
There is a point to be made in this article though. But it’s not that one poem is objectively better then the other. It’s the numbness that flows out of aesthetically pleasing words.
Poetry, like all art, has no true purpose. People make art to express themselves, or to experiment and research, or any other reason. There is also art that’s made to be beautiful. In the simpelest of ways. Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons are perfect examples of this, and so Rupi Kaur too.
The art is simple and pretty. She uses only aesthetic words and subjects. Insecurity, love, parental feelings. These are your live love laugh subjects and words. And so also Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst use big objects! It has to be shiny and round! Or maybe there are loads of diamonds! Pretty bright colors! Just something that is impressive on a very primal level.
But this is the part where the article makes some sort of a point. This type of art. This Rupi Kaur art. This live love laugh poetry is not perse bad poetry. But it’s poetry that’s only about you. When you like and read this poetry. You read it because you want to soothe yourself. You read it because you want to feel pretty feelings. Jeff Koons actually plays with this at one point, his famous giant baloon dogs made of metal have become reflective. It’s about you. You wanna look at pretty things.
You don’t care about the artist. You don’t care about different opinions. You don’t want to learn or explore. You don’t want to see the nuance and the depth of what life has to offer. The difficulties. The people that like this don’t want to read a poem that’s about suicidal thoughts. Or some painting of an ugly goat in a pile of mud or whatever. It needs to be pretty with pretty colors and deep sounding words.
I guess this is fine. We can’t all be 24/7 confronted with our harsh realities. It’s just that poetry carries a certain mysticism. It’s and incredible old art form. The weird part about this simple aesthetic poetry is that it’s hard to pinpoint the intention of the creator. Is it just a more immature mind discovering the art form for itself? Is it a company trying to make money out of generated content? Is it somebody who just wants to get attention by making something others will like?
These are questions you can ask yourself as an experiment. What do you think the intention of the author was? Does it matter what their intention was? What is my intention with reading this? Am i curious of something new? Do i want to be acknowledged in what i already feel? Do i just want a cathartic experience?
Love ya’ll bye 😀
lemon_girl223 on
I’m so annoyed that the author mentions Haiku as an historical example of simplistic poetry. Haiku is based on centuries of intertextuality within the Japanese poetic tradition. Each flower, animal, place name, event, or scene, is usually an allusion to an older poem, which is how you get such deep and rich meaning. By alluding to older poems, you can contrast the usage of specific words between the two poems, and the way the author has changed or recontextualized the word becomes meaningful and significant.
As this article states, most instagram poetry is created in a vacuum; distinctly devoid of intertextuality or poetic tradition of its own. That being said, I think it’s good if only as a gateway to better, more nuanced poetry.
Badpoetry6 on
Lies, people do not love me everywhere. I have been mislead.
bookant on
Today I learned
that putting line breaks
in regular old banal sentences
makes it poetry!
masterofunfucking on
I blame Rupi Kaur
SirHovaOfBrooklyn on
Calling out Lang Leav.
Also. My first time on r/books and damn everyone writes walls of text lol.
mnl_cntn on
Poetry might be the written form that I just do not understand. Never have and still don’t. Heck I don’t know what makes a good poem, they all seem to be at the same quality to me.
bleufeline on
I think most of humanity has always had bad taste, the hyper-interconnectedness just revealed it now.
Humanity didn’t used to not like bad poetry, most of them probably wasn’t even exposed to any of it coz all they interact with is people and knowledge from their own small village.
We now have the internet, everybody gets to see everybody else, and the majority lack knowledge to critically appreciate “good” work, whatever “good” might even mean. But now everyone is showing their taste in poetry, amongst other cultural things.
My worry now is that the good stuff will actually get washed out and not even become significant enough to leave a cultural mark and in the history books.
e.g. if people are too busy listening to poorly made and nigh-mass-produced music that saturates the market, experimental and complex songs that could’ve built a cult following and shifted the paradigm within the music industry may not be able to reach critical mass to do so.
Emberashh on
The thing about writing poetry is that, relative to a lot of art forms, it’s very accessible. You technically don’t need to know how to read or write to be a poet. You just need to be able to speak your language. (And I bet one could argue even *that* is unnecessary)
The cost of that accessibility is that a lot of what ends up produced isn’t going to be particularly interesting or novel. The kind of poetry the article is talking about is no exception, but there is something there I think the article missed.
Namely that its the style of poetry thats popular and not necessarily any of the specific poems themselves.
And that tracks, to be frank, with the greater zeitgeist of how popular media is consumed. When zombies became a trend, the vast bulk of the entries in that genre were not individually popular, and among the ones that were, it was still more of a situation of “this concept is popular” and not “this show/movie/game” is popular.
And it’s probably also worthwhile to note that the nature of popularity had changed too. Engagement, good or bad, is a lot more important than it used to be, and this article is just evidence that these kinds of poetry are succeeding at driving engagement.
Arbyssandwich1014 on
I know art is subjective, but poetry has declined so much. And I think a lot of that comes down to lack of art literacy when it comes to poetry. People are completely fine saying that “The Room” is a bad movie. No one is gonna hop on their “People like what they like” horse and try to act like it’s high art. And that applies to certain books too. A lot of people love Twilight, but Twilight fans laugh at how creepy and wacky it gets. These fans understand what they love is not the peak of the artform and that’s fine.
However, poetry is more abstract and not often taught as in depth. It creates such a widening gap between good poetry and bad poetry. Now if you spout random pseudo-intellectualism, plagiarized proverbs, or horribly simple break-up advice you suddenly capture Instagram by storm. People love it because they think that’s what poetry is meant to be. Then they prop it up to NY Times Bestsellers lists.
And because poetry is seen as so abstract and “just from the heart” you become public enemy #1 if you criticize it. The people that write this half-baked unrefined poetry are going off pure emotion. They aren’t considering the history of poetry or the forms of poetry. And no one is really saying “Hey that’s not that good you can do better.”
Idk. I don’t want to keep people from liking what they like. Nor am I an expert on poetry or something. It’s just very clear that poetry used to have a large cultural sway. It used to help lead whole art movements. Now it’s that thing youtubers do to sound like Rupi Kaur. It all says exactly what it is and how to think instead of making people think. We can do better. It’s okay to criticize art sometimes.
Einaris on
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I am a poet
This might annoy you
EmFly15 on
My philosophy? If you don’t like it, don’t read it and put it out of mind. If you like it, read it and treasure it.
Obviously, the plagiarism sucks, but I’ll never tell someone that their own work isn’t worth a damn, especially if it strikes a chord with a million people or even just one person. Like, as an example, I’m not a fan of Kaur, but I know many people who are. They have a right to read and enjoy her work, just as much as this VICE writer has a right to read and enjoy the work of Keats or Whitman or whoever.
Live and let live, IMO.
urabewe on
The Vogons would be proud. This is their time to shine.
13thFleet on
I see this stuff less as poetry and more as “professional quote-making” to reference an infamous reddit post.
If you judge it as poetry, it sucks.
But if you judge it as quotes that are meaningful to people, it’s fine.
BlatchfordS on
Fran Lebowitz did an interview in *Vanity Fair* on the subject of money, and was asked about the platitude: *The best way to get rich is to do what you love*.
LEBOWITZ: “If doing what you loved made you rich, the richest people would be bad poets and good teachers.”
Piepally on
I want ^a burger
I’m
hungry
Lee230290 on
It feels like the kind of modern poets in question here are entirely unfamiliar with the concept of ‘literary criticism’ – a discipline of feedback and critical assessment that most writers are very well acquainted with. It’s strange to see so many people responding to criticism with “Let people like what they like” or “You just think you’re better than me” types of comments that have absolutely nothing to do with discussing the merits of art.
MllePerso on
The problem I have with the Rupi Kaur etc style poem isn’t just its verbal or metric simplicity, but its overall worldview of smug self-helpified emotional conventionality. I have read works by total amateur teenage poets, written in free verse using few to zero metaphors or intertextual references, that are still 10000000x better than Kaur’s stuff because they express sincere emotions and aren’t trying to be “inspirational” or show the author’s “wisdom”.
27 Comments
People listen to “bad” music, watch “bad” movies and TV, eat fast food, drink cheap wine and play bad video games. It’s wonderful and is part of what gives life richness and joy.
We don’t get joy out of things based some unknown expert’s opinion, but our own experience.
Read and write your bad poetry. Sing your favourite songs. Read a garbage novel. Enjoy yourself.
And if you think your superior taste entitles you to judge someone else, I have a bad poem for you:
Roses are red
Violeta are blue
Fuck the high horse you rode in on
And fuck you too
[removed]
This reminds me of my dad looking down on fantasy books because I didn’t want to read Will Smith’s autobiography
Tbh it would be extremely irritating as a poet to put work into your craft and try to say something interesting/in a new way, and then get completely outshone by some generic post-breakup advice with line breaks thrown in randomly.
Also I don’t get the defensive comments – the article criticized the style and gave possible reasons for it getting so popular. Nowhere did it say the readers of this stuff are inferior to readers of more critically acclaimed poetry.
Meh, I dont really care if people enjoy Rupi Kaur. My niece asked me for Milk and Honey for Christmas one year so I got her that and also bought her a copy of one of Terrance Hayes books of poetry. Idk if she ever read the Hayes book, but if Rupi Kaur sparked her interest in poetry then she has more of a chance to read it than if she hadn’t gotten interested
If anybody knows where bad writing is, it’s Vice.
huge problem in media consumption right now: people feel the need for their tastes to “be right” or make them look smart, so they get on the internet and try to justify mid writing as literature.
the only real problem with “bad poetry,” which the article touches on, is when it becomes so basic it crosses over into plagiarism and just reiterates to the reader the same ideas they already know in an infinite loop. i think we’ll see a lot more of that kind of writing as AI becomes more popular.
you can like something and also know that it’s of medium-to-poor quality. something can be “good for my social media post” and not “good.” people just hate being transparent on social media and they hate admitting that they either aren’t too well read or prefer a high-school-level writing style. so it NEEDS to be “good poetry,” and then we get this style of thinkpiece article every 8 months or so.
bro there has to be more factors when it comes to this but I think its getting harder to find “good” poetry, art, etc. simply due to oversaturation. you can either choose to keep looking or be satisfied with what you found.
I like Coleridge and Shel Silverstein. My exposure to poetry doesn’t go past that, but I think I might like reading more of the greats.
There is a point to be made in this article though. But it’s not that one poem is objectively better then the other. It’s the numbness that flows out of aesthetically pleasing words.
Poetry, like all art, has no true purpose. People make art to express themselves, or to experiment and research, or any other reason. There is also art that’s made to be beautiful. In the simpelest of ways. Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons are perfect examples of this, and so Rupi Kaur too.
The art is simple and pretty. She uses only aesthetic words and subjects. Insecurity, love, parental feelings. These are your live love laugh subjects and words. And so also Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst use big objects! It has to be shiny and round! Or maybe there are loads of diamonds! Pretty bright colors! Just something that is impressive on a very primal level.
But this is the part where the article makes some sort of a point. This type of art. This Rupi Kaur art. This live love laugh poetry is not perse bad poetry. But it’s poetry that’s only about you. When you like and read this poetry. You read it because you want to soothe yourself. You read it because you want to feel pretty feelings. Jeff Koons actually plays with this at one point, his famous giant baloon dogs made of metal have become reflective. It’s about you. You wanna look at pretty things.
You don’t care about the artist. You don’t care about different opinions. You don’t want to learn or explore. You don’t want to see the nuance and the depth of what life has to offer. The difficulties. The people that like this don’t want to read a poem that’s about suicidal thoughts. Or some painting of an ugly goat in a pile of mud or whatever. It needs to be pretty with pretty colors and deep sounding words.
I guess this is fine. We can’t all be 24/7 confronted with our harsh realities. It’s just that poetry carries a certain mysticism. It’s and incredible old art form. The weird part about this simple aesthetic poetry is that it’s hard to pinpoint the intention of the creator. Is it just a more immature mind discovering the art form for itself? Is it a company trying to make money out of generated content? Is it somebody who just wants to get attention by making something others will like?
These are questions you can ask yourself as an experiment. What do you think the intention of the author was? Does it matter what their intention was? What is my intention with reading this? Am i curious of something new? Do i want to be acknowledged in what i already feel? Do i just want a cathartic experience?
Love ya’ll bye 😀
I’m so annoyed that the author mentions Haiku as an historical example of simplistic poetry. Haiku is based on centuries of intertextuality within the Japanese poetic tradition. Each flower, animal, place name, event, or scene, is usually an allusion to an older poem, which is how you get such deep and rich meaning. By alluding to older poems, you can contrast the usage of specific words between the two poems, and the way the author has changed or recontextualized the word becomes meaningful and significant.
As this article states, most instagram poetry is created in a vacuum; distinctly devoid of intertextuality or poetic tradition of its own. That being said, I think it’s good if only as a gateway to better, more nuanced poetry.
Lies, people do not love me everywhere. I have been mislead.
Today I learned
that putting line breaks
in regular old banal sentences
makes it poetry!
I blame Rupi Kaur
Calling out Lang Leav.
Also. My first time on r/books and damn everyone writes walls of text lol.
Poetry might be the written form that I just do not understand. Never have and still don’t. Heck I don’t know what makes a good poem, they all seem to be at the same quality to me.
I think most of humanity has always had bad taste, the hyper-interconnectedness just revealed it now.
Humanity didn’t used to not like bad poetry, most of them probably wasn’t even exposed to any of it coz all they interact with is people and knowledge from their own small village.
We now have the internet, everybody gets to see everybody else, and the majority lack knowledge to critically appreciate “good” work, whatever “good” might even mean. But now everyone is showing their taste in poetry, amongst other cultural things.
My worry now is that the good stuff will actually get washed out and not even become significant enough to leave a cultural mark and in the history books.
e.g. if people are too busy listening to poorly made and nigh-mass-produced music that saturates the market, experimental and complex songs that could’ve built a cult following and shifted the paradigm within the music industry may not be able to reach critical mass to do so.
The thing about writing poetry is that, relative to a lot of art forms, it’s very accessible. You technically don’t need to know how to read or write to be a poet. You just need to be able to speak your language. (And I bet one could argue even *that* is unnecessary)
The cost of that accessibility is that a lot of what ends up produced isn’t going to be particularly interesting or novel. The kind of poetry the article is talking about is no exception, but there is something there I think the article missed.
Namely that its the style of poetry thats popular and not necessarily any of the specific poems themselves.
And that tracks, to be frank, with the greater zeitgeist of how popular media is consumed. When zombies became a trend, the vast bulk of the entries in that genre were not individually popular, and among the ones that were, it was still more of a situation of “this concept is popular” and not “this show/movie/game” is popular.
And it’s probably also worthwhile to note that the nature of popularity had changed too. Engagement, good or bad, is a lot more important than it used to be, and this article is just evidence that these kinds of poetry are succeeding at driving engagement.
I know art is subjective, but poetry has declined so much. And I think a lot of that comes down to lack of art literacy when it comes to poetry. People are completely fine saying that “The Room” is a bad movie. No one is gonna hop on their “People like what they like” horse and try to act like it’s high art. And that applies to certain books too. A lot of people love Twilight, but Twilight fans laugh at how creepy and wacky it gets. These fans understand what they love is not the peak of the artform and that’s fine.
However, poetry is more abstract and not often taught as in depth. It creates such a widening gap between good poetry and bad poetry. Now if you spout random pseudo-intellectualism, plagiarized proverbs, or horribly simple break-up advice you suddenly capture Instagram by storm. People love it because they think that’s what poetry is meant to be. Then they prop it up to NY Times Bestsellers lists.
And because poetry is seen as so abstract and “just from the heart” you become public enemy #1 if you criticize it. The people that write this half-baked unrefined poetry are going off pure emotion. They aren’t considering the history of poetry or the forms of poetry. And no one is really saying “Hey that’s not that good you can do better.”
Idk. I don’t want to keep people from liking what they like. Nor am I an expert on poetry or something. It’s just very clear that poetry used to have a large cultural sway. It used to help lead whole art movements. Now it’s that thing youtubers do to sound like Rupi Kaur. It all says exactly what it is and how to think instead of making people think. We can do better. It’s okay to criticize art sometimes.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I am a poet
This might annoy you
My philosophy? If you don’t like it, don’t read it and put it out of mind. If you like it, read it and treasure it.
Obviously, the plagiarism sucks, but I’ll never tell someone that their own work isn’t worth a damn, especially if it strikes a chord with a million people or even just one person. Like, as an example, I’m not a fan of Kaur, but I know many people who are. They have a right to read and enjoy her work, just as much as this VICE writer has a right to read and enjoy the work of Keats or Whitman or whoever.
Live and let live, IMO.
The Vogons would be proud. This is their time to shine.
I see this stuff less as poetry and more as “professional quote-making” to reference an infamous reddit post.
If you judge it as poetry, it sucks.
But if you judge it as quotes that are meaningful to people, it’s fine.
Fran Lebowitz did an interview in *Vanity Fair* on the subject of money, and was asked about the platitude: *The best way to get rich is to do what you love*.
LEBOWITZ: “If doing what you loved made you rich, the richest people would be bad poets and good teachers.”
I want ^a burger
I’m
hungry
It feels like the kind of modern poets in question here are entirely unfamiliar with the concept of ‘literary criticism’ – a discipline of feedback and critical assessment that most writers are very well acquainted with. It’s strange to see so many people responding to criticism with “Let people like what they like” or “You just think you’re better than me” types of comments that have absolutely nothing to do with discussing the merits of art.
The problem I have with the Rupi Kaur etc style poem isn’t just its verbal or metric simplicity, but its overall worldview of smug self-helpified emotional conventionality. I have read works by total amateur teenage poets, written in free verse using few to zero metaphors or intertextual references, that are still 10000000x better than Kaur’s stuff because they express sincere emotions and aren’t trying to be “inspirational” or show the author’s “wisdom”.