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.

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.