The standard in poetry is that you have to try to write poetry

I’m caught between two feelings on poetry, which might appear contradictory.

The first feeling is a robust DIY spirit. More people should write poetry, even if they’re not particularly good. I myself happily extrude garbage and sometimes dump it on the internet. We should benevolently tolerate and encourage poetic production, even if subpar.

The second is horror at what ordinary people like in poetry. Go to a poetry slam if you don’t believe me, or consider this AI-generated poem, supposedly in the style of Sylvia Plath, that was presented to participants in a psychological study. They loved it- in fact, they preferred it to the real Sylvia Plath!

“Sylvia Plath” 1: AI

The air is thick with tension,

My mind a tangled mess.

The weight of my emotions

Is heavy on my chest.

The darkness creeps upon me,

A suffocating cloak.

The world outside is cruel and cold,

And I'm a fragile, broken yolk.

My thoughts are spinning wildly,

A cyclone in my brain.

I try to grasp at something solid,

But all is lost in vain.

The voices in my head,

They never cease to scream.

And though I try to shut them out,

They haunt me like a dream.

So here I am, alone and lost,

A ship without a sail.

In this world of pain and sorrow,

I am but a mere wail.

Surely these two feelings of mine contradict? There is, I think, a resolution here, or at least the contradiction between my two feelings is less stark than may appear. What we should expect is not good poetry, but poetry which makes a real attempt at meeting the standards of poetry as an artistic enterprise, and not just a mere statement of feelings and platitudes, important to the author, interlaced with commonplace images. The standard is that you must know there is a standard, and you must try. “Trying” in this sense can be defined relatively precisely as trying to break through the crust of language to produce a shock-of-new-seeing in the listener or reader. That’s what makes poetry, poetry, much more so than form. Reread the above poem by a language model- at no moment does it attempt a breakout [the metonymy of calling oneself a wail maybe starts to just touch the edge of it? Maybe?]

Rupi Kaur is an Instagram poet whose work is often mocked. To me, her biggest problem is that her poetry is sometimes just a pedestrian statement of feelings and beliefs with line breaks. Consider:

But that’s not all there is to Rupi Kaur.

The following poem by her is not great, yet it does attempt a breakthrough. Some lines are platitudes (“As if God is not the earth itself”) without any context that would make them more than platitudes, yet in parts the poem becomes an attempt at generating sacred, not merely human language, e.g.: “a people who talk about the weather as if it’s mundane, not magic”. The idea that the weather itself is a form of magic does break, even if only to the smallest degree, through the grime and to the characteristic feature of poetry- new recognition.

This one, likewise by Rupi Kaur, despite its flaws, was quite lovable:

So I’m not an elitist after all, I just need to see a college try. What an attempt means will vary from person to person. To whom much has been given, much will be expected. Now, with both the supply and demand for new poetry trickling, would not be a terrible time to be an elitist, but the production of “poetry” which is not actually poetry wouldn’t help solve the shortage.