It is always about how much you “produce”. You are worthy of what you produce; whether it’s your work, your assets, your “social capital” which is another word for how many followers you have on social media, and your production of who you are.
I’m not an expert in Neoliberalism, and I leave greater experts and academics who dedicated their lives studying this philosophy and phenomenon to explain it better than I do. (I recommend to watch this film and to read Naomi Klein and George Monbiot). But overall, it’s a philosophy that measures the worth of any individual by his or her production of capital and participation in the society. This line of thought favors individualism (as each one wants to survive and produce more to gain more worth) and disintegrates the social fabric of the society (belonging to a family, a community or a group). It commercializes culture and makes a profit out of it as if this is the only way to hold on to it. In other word, it creates an alienated society that only care about profit.
In this world, the poet stands on the margin. The poet is measured by how many poems he publishes on Instagram, by how many likes he received and by how many views she has on her Instagram story. There is no time to reflect and go deep, because one needs to write and write quickly that is so they can publish and receive the immediate reward. This reality is a great danger to the whole nature of being a poet, and I effectively see this in the trashy poetry published on Instagram by people I highly doubt have ever analyzed a sonnet, experimented with meter or attempted to write a villanelle.
Meter and rhythm, structure and line breaks are not important anymore. Intention behind the diction and syntax is irrelevant. Although some of these poems use great imagery and ingenuous metaphors, but they lack something. They lack depth and pondering. They lack the skills that are developed over time by honing your inner desire to express yourself by words. One needs to read, write and re-write and revise. I see people writing couple of lines lacking any rhyme or rhythm and then they call it a poem. Let’s look at a very famous poet, Rupi Kaur.
This poem is one of the many other poems by this same poet that lack any musicality or sense of transcendence. I understand that the imagery is nice, but anyone can write this! Can anyone be a poet? who is a poet? and what makes good poetry? I don’t have answers for all of these questions, but I think each person who is willing to call themselves a poet should and must grapple with these questions. Out of this labor, beautiful poetics comes out to light. Live the process, and let the wave of poetry, with its ebbs and flow, carry you.
As an English Literature graduate who loves and experiments with writing poetry, I am aghast with the fall of quality of poetry. I am aware that I will need lots of time before I get published and it’s okay. I need time to sharpen my attention to musicality of a poem, I need to enhance my imagery and write and re-write many poems. It is totally fine.
In a desperate attempt to fix this situation, my friend and I started a collaborative project to nurture the culture of reading poetry. The project is called Poetry is Closer than the Sea and it aims to hold poetic workshops that attempt to provide people with basic tools to approach a poem, to meditate together and have fun.
Can a poet survive this neoliberal tide that keeps pushing them to succumb to the pressure of quantifying the sublime and the metaphysical? I think not. I think we would die before we run out of good poetry. But I believe that we have a responsibility to create a society that appreciates good poetry.
AICHA BINT YUSIF 