Moved to @starwiped

i pointed out a cool wasp to one and she just picked it up with her bare hands and started showing me different features she was using to identify the species

Exhibit A - the aforementioned Wordsworth poem:

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze …

Like, clearly this quote does not come from the same guy, right? This is just not the way poets wrote in the eary 1880s, be it in verse or in their other writings. People just didn’t talk that way, or write that way back then.. So this is categorically not a Wordsworth quote.

Furthermore, this is is such a perfect example of how Instagram poetry (think Atticus, Rupi Kaur et al) works - a quote that sounds vaguely poetic but is very straightforward, and is designed to hit you with an ‘oh my god, it me’ feeling on impact. Two lines you can share and be like ‘so true, #breakup #movingon #2023 #life’ etc.

So, my first thought is that this is like every other one of those fake quote images where someone attributes something quippy and insightful and faux-profound that they wish someone super famous had said. The internet loves a quotable famous dead person, right? And Wordsworth is a poet everyone knows the name of but no one’s actually engaged with the work of (because tbh it’s dated and flowery and sort of boring). 

Exhibit B:

So I figure okay, someone thought of that sort-of-poetic, sort-of insightful line an figured it’d get shared more widely with a famous person’s name on it. Wordsworth is a famous poet with an instantly recognisable appropriate name, job done.

BUT then i google the line on its own, and discover that of course the above isn’t the first iteration - this has been made into multiple image memes with typewrite on paper or, like the above, making it look like it was highlighted from a paperback or something. Then I find Exhibit C:

Looking at the attribution on that clear Instagram post, that’s not claiming it’s Wordsworth at all, but an account called WordsOfWorth. Following down that rabbit hole, I find multiple re-posts of similar free-verse-affirmation-Instagram-quotable-poetry in similiar image styles attributing to the same account, but the username is now owned by someone else with 2 followers and 4 posts in a totally different, less polished style.

So here’s what I think happened: a genuine case of mistaken identity where someone misread Wordsofworth as ‘Wordsworth’ and didn’t have either the high school English Lit or the internet nouse to just double-check before making a whole new image in a different but similar faux-authentic format and reposting with the wrong attribution.

All of which means nothing of course because the account’s gone, and it’s not like it matters anyway. I just think the whole Instagram poetry/affirmation thing is fascinating, especially the ways it seeks to legitimise itself. 

The fact no one thought to check whether that attribution was right, the assumption that any vaguely insightful quote could come from any source and that fact-checking that either doesn’t matter, or is undesireable to the outcome. The work that goes into making an image like this, making it look like you underlined the words in a book when - clearly - this quote was born on the internet and has never been printed. The desireability of association with a famous name, even a name the creator has either no familiarity with or no care for the real work of, seeking legitimacy through that association.

Then there’s the format itself, again seeking legitimacy through de-internet-ising an artform born, raised, and designed for the internet. Short, catchy, shareable poetry in a line or two, with none of the meter or poetic format of older styles of poetry, where the literary aesthetic of the image it’s presented in is half the point.

Credit atticuspoetry on instagram.

It’s just a sentence, and a fairly straightforward, ordinary sentence at that - it’s the line at the end of a romance novel, or an affirmation a meditation app might tell you to repeat. It’s a million miles from the Wordsworth poem at the top of this post in terms of form, use of langauge, audience, and intention. It’s on the borderline between affirmation and poem, but one of those has significantly more cultural cache as a label than the other. Like it’s worried it might be one thing masquerading as the other, and so has to put on a costume to accentuate it’s poem status.

Bringing ‘real’ poems into this area - even accidentally as I think happened in this case - and presenting the poem in an ‘authentic’ format (e.g. a photograph of a printed page or the evocation of such) lends legitimacy.

When those of us from the places where that symbol meant terror, death and suffering, see that symbol the ideology we envision isn't some detached socialist ideal removed from the reality of USSR.

Or that many of these groups who do use it openly promote and praise the USSR more often than the criticise it. So let's not act like it's a blank slate of "socialism" because it isn't.

Hell, half the shit we have to hear is about runic symbols that apparently mean someone is a Nazi, regardless of how old those symbols are or how varied their use may have been. Because there's something to that and we understand this.

The problem is that you lot have decided that the victims of the USSR, which number in the millions and range in origin and ethnicity, are not ones you will recognize. That they all deserved it somehow or whatever makes it feel ok that they suffered for the great experiment id communism (tm). So you don't see the problem of using a symbol that very much does stand not for the theoretical ideology of socialism but a very specific enactment of the idea, one that was arguably a failure and a nightmare.

It's like the way words become slurs and you don't get to tell the target of those slurs that you are going to keep using the word because you don't find its meaning offensive. It's just you don't think our history and experiences matter enough to actually hear that, don't respect us enough as people to try to understand that yeah, wearing that symbol, for an eastern European, or a Crimean Tatars or a Georgian or a Chechen or a Qazaq, or a Fin may be kind of offensive and weird when coupled with claims about being liberal (not liberal with an L as in "I'm a liberal" but simply as opposed to conservative") or for social justice.