X

They seem / to think / if you write like this it makes / your poetry better.

if I wrote

my entire editorial 

in this format 

i wonder if someone 

on tiktok 

would call this 

the best poetry ever. 

As ridiculous as it seems, modern poetry has quickly dwindled into a form similar to the example above. 

Gone are the days of riddling iambic pentameter and melodic anaphora, an era that has woefully been replaced by sandbar sentences that could be written by just about any fourteen-year-old. As writing of such cursory has emerged predominantly over the past few years—a movement made evident on social media platforms such as TikTok—the very delineation of poetry has seemed to dilapidate under the guise of surface-level stanzas. 

Yet, take simply a glance at Amazon’s bestselling poetry page, and such writing can surely be seen selling millions of copies worldwide. 

Among the titles on this list is one recurring poet whose work went viral on TikTok just this past year: a writer named Aliza Grace, who quickly gained traction online with some of her notable work. Hundreds of TikToks with millions of views depict her seemingly raw and harrowing writing.

For reference of this so-called revolutionary work, here is an example of some of her poetry:

“*hurts me 217 times* / maybe i should give them a second chance.”

Upon further reflection, it is quite possible that she is not the modern-day Shakespeare that she is made out to be in her comment section online.

Before even mentioning the quasi-acuity in such writing, the very root of her sentence structure can immediately be seen as indolent. Almost every poem in this particular book is comprised of anywhere between two to four lines, an edifice that—if not being separated by fatuous line breaks—culminates to only about one sentence when written standardly. This measly, pseudo-profound format, while perhaps a method to convey weight and pause in the writing, only highlights the lack of substance and the influx of faux-intellectualism it really holds. 

Additionally, most books of such nature harness no attempt at grammatical or logographic correctness, with virtually zero punctuation and blatant linguistic errors throughout the course of the book. Multiple times in this novel, she utilized glaringly incorrect pronoun usage, bringing about the question of whether her work was even skimmed by an editor. Subsequently, random lines of each poem are thrown into italicization, a possible effort to add emphasis that comes across as painfully contrived. 

Yet, poetry of this caliber seems to be the most highly praised in today’s society.

The results of the decline of poetic standards extend beyond just social media, however. 2017 Goodreads’ Choice Awards Best Poetry winner and New Republic’s “Writer of the Decade,” Rupi Kaur, has somehow passed her tremendously popular yet correspondingly lackluster writing off as some of the 21st century’s most impressive poetry, most of which is a corroboration of non-thought provoking ideals and depthless conceptualism. Despite her many accolades and accomplishments in her respective genre, her work is unfortunately just as anticlimactic and banal as the next amateur poet, a theme seen clearly in her 2017 collection, “The Sun and Her Flowers,” where she writes, “stay / i whispered / as you / shut the door behind you.” 

While perhaps a great quote for a heartbroken seventh grader to post on their Snapchat story after getting dumped by Johnny from math class, this can barely be considered a poem.

All that being said, poetry is not an art of minimalism, nor is it made to cater to consumers. Its rightful form takes on one of true vulnerability and nuance. What was once a community of crafted poets toiling over their contribution to revivalism for the art they love is now vested in the hands of the so-called pinnacles of modern poetry, who all seem to conform to fleeting online trends and stray from gravitational thoughts. 

While the words of such a genre used to ferry vision and profundity, the fragmented, easily digestible poetry that has manifested in tandem with much of the peripheral content of the online world has managed to turn an art into a superficial parallelism of itself.