& still, the waves

I don’t know I don’t really intellectualize it it’s mostly like. does it make my tummy hurt does it give me goosebumps does it make my heart beat faster. I haven’t really gone further than emily dickinson saying if I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry

oh well I do think that statement is unfair cuz the tweet that started all of that was a bit disingenuous claiming 75% of contemporary poems were tweets/tumblr posts in poem form when I read across the wide spectrum of poetry written and published today and its simply not true. however we’ve also reached a certain momentum in which people will just write anything and call it poetry - something something substack era something something random celebrities pretending to be poets something something cut fruit tender something something. so obviously the few poems guilty of that that make the rounds a few times a year on social media are not representative of contemporary poetry as a whole and sure they can be accused of laziness/tumblr post like writing/etc but its simply not what contemporary poetry is actually like once you dig thru the surface level