“Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” - Dylan Thomas
In an ideal world, the best work would be the most widely seen and the most highly praised. But this is not reality. Instead, many of the best poems, as their publication in top journals suggests, are hidden behind paywalls, while lower quality ones litter the internet under the banner of “instapoetry.”
On social media I encounter countless poets who write short and shallow blurbs in the hope that something they write will stick. All too often, this desire to write is paired with a lack of talent or experience, and in this digital age, in which publication is easily available to everyone, the world is cluttered with writing that not only sullies the name of poetry but also convinces new readers and writers that this is what poetry is.
Today social media and modern conveniences have allowed the number of writers to grow exponentially, making it difficult to discern who the best or most prominent ones might be. Of course, the media will tell you who the most important writers are, and the name Ocean Vuong may ring a bell, but digesting the wealth of writing that now exists, both good and bad, is a taxing feat. It is easier to rally around the writers we have been told to admire. This is why the work of literary critics and academics is valuable. Otherwise, the big six Romantic-era poets (Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge) would alone reign supreme, and John Clare, for example, would not be increasingly regarded as a prominent poet of his time.
Though we should not allow the media to determine who is worth reading, it would be wrong to claim that writers who achieve fame are not worth an ounce of it, at least on the whole. The great English Romantic poets, as well as Victorian poets such as Swinburne and the Brownings, must continuously be taught and praised in order to impress upon the impressionable what poetry can achieve. How will they know what potential poetry has, or what greatness lies tucked away, if all they are given is Rupi Kaur and Ocean Vuong, who may not be worth all the fuss?
All of this is to suggest that we recognize the growing faults of the contemporary poetry world, that we not be distracted by what is merely trendy, and to redirect our focus to what is virtuous and skillful. In recognizing its faults, we must raise poetry once more to the standards by which it was measured in the past. If we are to reevaluate it as the essential, excellent, and powerful art that it is, we must reignite our taste for merit and virtue by reflecting on those standards of a time gone by and reestablishing them in a contemporary world marked by experimental laxness, confessional and identity-based writing, and a culture of instant gratification and addiction. This begins by raising our own standards for reading and writing, for education, and by rallying to find a balance between making poetry accessible to all and resisting “instapoetry”.
Though I see talent in some contemporary work, I encourage other writers to submit to established journals, magazines and traditional publishers and, above all, to persist in a our shared devotion to poetry and to insist on the value of its older forms.
Caidan Pilaski is Editor-In-Chief of Lucky Lizard Journal and Extramural Contributor to The California Review
