Article by Rebecca Watts on the instapoet rising and what it is, what it means, and what it isn’t. Please enjoy.
Read it !
Fitbit readout : July 12, 2018
Total steps : 12,166
Floors climbed : 11
Calories burned : 2766
Elevation gained : 110 feet
Traveled : 5.56 miles
Sedentary minutes : 1215
Lightly active minutes : 157
Fairly active minutes : 15
Very active minutes : 53
July 12, 2018
via Fitbit
Instapoets
prettified packaged “poetry”, dumbed down for girls who don’t grok actual poetry.
Lately I’ve taken note (kind of difficult not to notice) the burgeoning rise of instapoets and their proliferation on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. From the overly hyped Lang Leav to Rumi Kaur’s rather annoying work Milk & Honey. I finally breezed through Leav’s Sea of Strangers, and couldn’t really get past the first few pages without wanting to vomit. Her formula was rather simple : she offers up a fusion of melancholy and nostalgia and bemoans what could have been, what might have been, how hurt she was from relationships that did/didn’t actually take place., and perhaps most hilarious is these little jibes and “you missed out” notes to the guys she actually didn’t have relationships with…borriiinnnnggggg. The target audience for this are 20 something girls on Instagram and Tumblr that reblog witty memes and amass all the photos of pinterest, tumblr, instagram that they can grab hold of, eating up all the cloud space of the interwebs in the process.
Instapoets are asian carp, and once introduced into a new ecosystem such as the great lakes they infest it and contaminates the waters for the rest of the fish.
Yet I had to ask myself which was more annoying than the other. I would say at the very least Rumi seemed more normalized. Lang Leav looks like a Chinese girl cosplaying as an Amish woman. I know, shallow, but these are just trivial observations. I don’t care very much about who they are as individuals.
Rumi’s Milk & Honey is a must read if you’re an “Instagram” girl, or a girl who goes through a great deal of emotional suffering from relationships you either never actually had, or kind of wish you secretly did. Rumi paints these snatches of relationship thought processes that sound like bits bitten from this or that type of dark chick flick. I can already see why she’s hit it big. She’s mixing pseudo poetry with a trashy romance and private journal entries…appealing to girls who need poetry dumbed down for them. This being your basic Ambercrombie & Fitch model wannabes. Yet Rumi just as Leav paints things in a fictitious light, and puts a negative light on men (of course) as a convenient scapegoat for all the “pain” and other wrongs she depicts. Cheap, shoddy, lazy writing that sells like futuristic fat free chocolate gelato. Yet, it’s not true poetry, it’s garbage doggerel at best…these authors create these works so that instagirls can repost, reblog and repopulate the inter webs with it.
Now I can see why true poets would despise these hacks, they’re charlatans who commanded an audience they procurred from online to offline. Their works are a slap in the face to real published poets whose rich works far outweigh theirs.
This is pretty much disastrous IMHO because it’s poisoning the proverbial ink well. It causes true poets to forget any standard or bar to aspire toward. It’s also deceptive, because these girls aren’t in fact even poets, just imposters and tourists. They write these emo ridden verses that plays on the heartstrings, simplistic drivel that belongs more in an animé love story than anything. Miscategorized. There are golden standards set, and while Rumi Kaur’s defense of “accessible” for her own work well poetry is accessible to those who want to access it. If it requires actual intellect to comprehend it, interpret it, and extract from it well that’s precisely why it is what it is ! Now that these man hating, feminist political wannabe poets have risen and stolen their own successes from emo/broken instagram mallrat princess types. When you tell the literary minded that all it takes to make it is to amass social media followers then you’re no longer an actual author you’re just a hack yourself.
dear future me
monday’s are so bleh, seemingly impervious to preparations to make it an otherwise perfect one.
I didn’t get much time to do anything I wanted to over the weekend, from hitting the gym to a haircut. Guess it’ll have to wait til later. I’m so not a morning person how much more than monday mornings, even less of a non morning person. That almost makes sense.
I run stoops early in the morning several laps pretty soon he’ll need his own fitbit, no longer working out of home but have to commute across the city in the west loop area (they generically call everything “loop” in Chitown). I see dead frogs lying across the main path, but contrasting this grisly scene is the flowery fragrance of the wild flowers growing in this eco park. They even have little snakes, crayfish coming out of this lagoon, kinda kookie since we’re in the city and not some sort of outdoor zoo, but in a very cool way. Shows our requirement for nature even on a smaller scale and the good it could do for our psyche’s.
Most weekends this park gets overrun by obnoxious little league takeovers, they come and trash it and then leave like they graced it with their presence. Seems to be the norm in the city, a regular thing for families to come together and get their children into something other than video gaming and being indoor recluses. I always detested sports, its such a showy contest of win/lose, a dated and passé paradigm that predominantly caucasians still adhere to religiously. In a very real sense competitive sports is religion. If you’re a creative and imaginative being you just don’t see the point since nothing is created from all of the energies, no tangible proof in the end result. You only proved that you can spend, but there’s no evidence of the spending and thus no ROI. When art or poems get made, they tell the viewer or the critic alike that this was made with intellect and with skill, with thoughtful purpose and there’s something profound and beautiful in it, despite the level of mastery in the making of these works.
The sun feels good, the heat does as well. I sleep deeply after a hard days work, beautifully and warmly. I felt like I could write vividly about a hundred different things right now but zeroing in and focus on one was a challenging pain point. It’s not a matter of what others wanted to read, but what I wanted to say. And I wrote from the angle of having something worthy of being said and read, something positive and pleasurable but not hurtful, damaging, or overly critical. Nor do I write in the sense that I’m all that and a bag of chips, somebody whose leading a rock and roll lifestyle and gets out of bed looking like a CK male model (though I have in the past I must admit). In a very real sense I’m very real, unpretentiously pretentious, deeply shallow, tangible, accessible, not so much out there but not so much here in the now. I’ve an old soul, I remember things…the way we once were, the times before the internets and when people were once normal and far more lovely.
I’m not here to monetize and to be liked, followed, beloved.…yet if these things occur so be it, but I don’t live for that. It’s unimportant really, validation is overrated particularly by strangers who are wayward and variable.
Fitbit readout : July 7, 2018
Total steps : 12843
Floors climbed : 7
Calories burned : 2745
Elevation gained : 70 feet
Traveled : 5.87 miles
Sedentary minutes : 1221
Lightly active minutes : 145
Fairly active minutes : 25
Very active minutes : 49
July 7, 2018
via Fitbit
Fitbit readout : July 6, 2018
Total steps : 6894
Floors climbed : 8
Calories burned : 2499
Elevation gained : 80 feet
Traveled : 3.15 miles
Sedentary minutes : 1267
Lightly active minutes : 149
Fairly active minutes : 2
Very active minutes : 22
July 6, 2018
via Fitbit
Joggers Journal : Sanctuary
Photo Story : my current sanctuary in nature : Gomper’s Park.
I come here quite often of late, to meditate and pray, to reflect, and to bask in simple tranquility. Also to get devoured by rather aggressive mosquithoes.…get it ? see that’s funny because I used to the word “hoes” in it ^_^. Tyler Durden : “Oh I get it, that’s pretty clever. How’s that working out for ya?”.
It’s just a sanctuary away from it all, even if it’s not truly nature it’s as close as one can get. Sometimes I’m just a park bench poet, other times a park bench artiste, and for awhile I forget myself, I forget all of the ceaseless chatterings of the yes-men, the lotus eaters and their religion of conformity, and the lost sheep who adorn themselves with tats and piercings to conceal their identity crisis…like it’s going to make them sooooo interesting. Go read a book if you want to be interesting, go write some vivid poetry that takes me somewhere other than your 24⁄7 pity party. Take me where you don’t belong, invite me to the strange place you’re too terrified of visiting inside yourself because you don’t want me there.
I’ve seen people who live in a moment their trapped in, it’s so sad. They can move on, they just refuse to, like living in this particular moment will somehow alter reality and reshape their future. Some of us are an unstoppable force on a collision course with an unmovable object.
As always thanks for reading.
Summer Notes, 2018
Dear people,
I came online, once more in yet another dalliance with an online presence or some semblance of it. Call it my need for a short attention span theater of the mind. The bulk majority of people whether online or off have the attention span of four year olds give or take.
Despite these pretty well known facts about culture life, about the not so new “normalcy” of existing in this information overload, I decided to resurrect my own cute little personal blog/journal thang, and why not ? I’ve so much to share with you, and there’s also so much I’m not going to bother with. Chock it up to a tedium of telling, or the exhausting drain of granular details even I myself don’t care much for…much less any intrepid person deciding to read my “stuff”.
I work as a Digital Art Director, but I’m mostly a poet + writer first and an artiste + designer second, even if it was the other way around growing up. I grew up in an era when CD and vinyl album art inspired me into graphic design well before the invention of photoshop and illustrator.
It’s summer of 2018 right now. In Chicago, we just celebrated the 4th of July. People are still firing off all of their paychecks worth of fireworks in the city. I’m presently residing in Albany park, in what was once commonly known as “Ktown” (Korea town). Now it’s transformed into taqueria town, and there’s a tamale vendor on every corner. Personally I love it, I like the street traffic, the many ordinary citizens who pass through, and the energy. There’s some beautiful nature parks nearby that I run with my faithful hound stoops (aka sari) an there’s Lawrence fish market still there beside a strip club called Admiral theater.
I find myself frolicking in nature quite a bit, soaking up what warmth and radiance that I can. Weekends whiz past at an alarming rate. Life goes slow even when it doesn’t, and for this I”m glad. Because for the lotus eaters out there it goes in an incomprehensible blur, and they do fail to enjoy it. People seem to enjoy being exasperated, exhausted, burnt out, tired, maybe even depressed or miserable. Not because they willingly opt to but think that this is it, this is the sacrifice required to lead semi charmed lives. Newsflash : it’s an illusion, a deception and all part of the rat race. No, trying a bit more and allot harder won’t see you through. Others, better people perhaps have thought as such. People you were even envious of thought as much.
I’m unwritten poetry on a park bench right now. I’m recording seasons and drawing people’s portraits. I’m discovering things you might yawn at, hidden things, gems, secrets, life. I had to take a trip into and out of myself to regain a sense of what it was I was trying to say to myself. You see this isn’t me at my finest, it’s me at my weakest, and through that you’ll discover something of yourself contained in the cracks, in the whitespace, in the narrow margins that define our distinctive realities.
Summer of 2018 was a gorgeous season and it seemed to be only getting a bit better.
It's nothing more or less than this, it's everything more and less than this.
It's a bottle of vino you bought that was a bit more expensive than your usual fare, that you didn't think you would love so much. Because you wouldn't have drank the whole bottle, alone. No, it's not that bottle, it's the one you bought after that the next day, realizing it's too expensive.
It's also a hand written love note you never got before because you didn't go to high school in the era where e-mail wasn't.
Lastly it's all the people who sat on a particular park bench in a particular park somewhere, and the stories they've unknowingly shared by simply sitting there. And every time one of these people found a page torn out of my journal, a frustrated poet's meanderings and scribbled lines, some of which delight and amaze them and other times confuses the average reader