Only bad poems go viral
donotresearch.substack.com
donotresearch.substack.com
But, they both look like mostly honest perspectives from particular types of people.
I see the first one and think of all the out of touch HS teachers I had who were so convinced their class was important and they were going to teach me an important life lesson and save me from underachieving by being hard on me in some way (usually being super strict on deadlines, or the guy who let me turn in my test with the back side not complete and didn't tell me or let me retry for partial credit - both my fault, but they taught me nothing). They had no concern for the fact I was just trying to get through the day. They just saw someone with potential who needed to learn from their mistakes by being held accountable. But I had missed deadlines in every class I ever took since middle school, if I could have just taught myself executive functioning and how to have a stable home life, I would have.
The second reminds me of a lot of some of my friends. They are anxious wrecks, obsessesing over the news constantly, meanwhile compulsively using social media to make calls for action and bring important things that they can't really actually impact to light. All the while, their personal life and mental health is a wreck, which they also loudly proclaim on social media.
So I think both poems were great insights into those perspectives. It's just that those perspectives are not exactly interesting and are sometimes a bit annoying.
It reminds me of https://poets.org/poem/antigonish-i-met-man-who-wasnt-there where in-context the poem is mediocre. But without the context it's really good, it conjures in your mind all kinds of strange interpretations.
This is confusing. How can you argue that those experiences didn't teach you anything?
But those experiences did teach me a little something. They taught me to be grateful that most teachers are decent, forgiving individuals with policies for partial credit when you're late, because they'd rather see you engaged in learning than discourage you from even trying to finish the assignment. These days schools mostly aren't allowed to dish out straight 0s that can't be improved. And FWIW, nearly all of my college courses had policies for partial credit too.
Now I actually have ways to manage my natural executive functioning deficits, so I'm better at that kind of stuff.
> These days schools mostly aren't allowed to dish out straight 0s that can't be improved. And FWIW, nearly all of my college courses had policies for partial credit too.
The state of pedagogy is in turmoil. Grade inflation and downright academic fraud are at all time highs. Students leave high school and college knowing less than ever.
Please keep in mind that I understand how hard it is to operate with an executive function deficit. I just don't think you're considering the ramifications of implementing your preferences beyond their impacts to you. I think there are plenty of "decent, forgiving" teachers that still enforce reasonably strict requirements even if they don't double check the back page of every test or give partial credit for habitually late work.
I have been asked to leave jobs before due to executive function issues and the same diagnosis. Trust me I'm not denying that this issue exists and that it's real issue for you personally.
And if you knew one of the specific teachers I was actually referring to, and what he did and why he got fired, perhaps you'd understand why it's difficult to consider him "decent". As a result, I don't assume all teachers mean well by default. But that particular anecdote is not one for HN, and this conversation is boring me as much as that poem.
I do hope you found some help for your ADHD though. There are lots of medicines and lifestyle changes that make it possible to function even in extremely demanding roles, though getting it all nailed down is tough.
My wife was talking to me the other day about how "all the poems in the New Yorker are bad." I think the last contemporary poet that I liked was Charles Bukowski [1] but even as a (not quite super) fan I think you don't need more than a copy of Post Office (an early novel of his) and one volume of his poems because from beginning to end his poems were about drinking alcohol, taking care of his cats, loose women, and gambling at the track.
Written by a mining billionaire, attached to a 30 tonne rock, dropped outside central HQ, entirely serious, completely unaware, mere conventions of speeling, granma, and sensibility tossed asunder.
Enjoy (?) https://www.businessinsider.com/everyone-is-laughing-at-aust...
I agree most poetry is bad at hitting my subjective quality markers, at tickling my sense of sophistication and meaning. I don't even like the majority of poetry from poets that I love. I fell in love with Cummings as a teenager and checked out his collected works and realized quickly that while I found some transcendent (and worth the slog through what wasn't), I also found the majority of the work of one of the most famous 20th C poets pretty meh.
Even for those who can outrace Sturgeon's Law (which I think Cummings achieved), it's an art, not or science, hit or miss. And alongside issues of quality, skill, and probability of hits there will also always be subjectivity in how a work hits each member of an audience.
Still... bad for what? As well as being an art, poetry is a humanity. The two chord punk rock song is definitely doing less and less sophisticated things than a Palestrina motet or even Steve Reich's studies in subtly changing simplicity and we lose something when we can't appreciate sophistication and intricacy (with or without being able to articulate the specifics). But we also lose something when we can't appreciate simple expression even with mediocre articulation.
Bad poems are probably doing something well enough alongside being bad at meeting various standards.
I recently got hooked into contemporary (i.e. modern) poetry. I fully understand why modern poetry seems hard to understand.
I believe most people innately love simple and deep modern poems. If you like poetry related to nature (sorry major typo!), check out Ada Limon (1) If you like poetry related to medicine and life, check out ACP poetry prize (2)
Not that I don't think they aren't also trying at the other points. I think they are over explaining, though.
I believe this is the point they’re ultimately making.
Also notable that twitter, specifically, is overwhelmingly signalling to the crowd. I think this has been true for a long time, but it does feel that it is more extreme now.
My guess is that this would be a more constructive argument against algorithms driving engagement. They are overwhelmingly hijacked by in group signals in ways that curated data, oddly, was not. Not that curation always worked, mind. You could build up more trust that curators at least put some reputation on the line with regards to other factors.
There is an interesting positive feedback loop:
1. Some people's messages are intended to be in-group signals and others' are not.
2. Because of the former, people sometimes intepret the latter as implicitly signally membership in the opposing group.
3. Once people start making that interpretation, they start using that deliberately, so now messages that don't look like group signals do look like group signals for the other group.
Eventually, the result is that nearly all messages are tribal markers and it's nearly impossible to say anything that isn't just a shibboleth.
The other issue is vocabulary. The "poems" shown here show their authors' very limited vocabularies. Say something interesting within a constrained structure using interesting language and imagery and you have good poetry. Trite sentiments expressed in "free verse" using ordinary words you would find in any random tweet or blog post or casual conversation, with no imagery? It is so pretentious to call it poetry.
> Talky free verse, prose poetry, or spoken word—while seemingly accessible—can also upset readers whose major exposure to poetry was through high school English. The absence of traditional markers they studied in class, like end-rhyme or meter, becomes instant evidence that something is “not real poetry” for this perpetually precocious crowd.
I thought this was half sarcasm when I read it, but no, here you are, in the comments.
It has nothing to do with what I "studied in class". Words have definitions and "poetry" is meaningless if it means "anything written down at all".
It's just very funny. I couldn't imagine being an adult and stubbornly insisting that you don't like the spaghetti because it's not how your mom made it for you and that's the only way spaghetti is supposed to be made. This sort of self-centered and yet entirely unselfconscious world view where you never question why you think such definitions and boundaries are fundamental truths, eternal and unbending.
To wit, you'll find there's a large amount of literature about "prose poetry", the most well known form being free verse. The idea being to capture or express some elements of poetry outside merely rhyme and meter. Which elements? How many are required to be considered "real" poetry? I can no more define that than Justice Stewart could define pornography [1].
This obsession with strict taxonomy is itself a shibboleth of the juvenile. What value does strict differentiation provide, if one exists at all? It is a poem because I deign it to be so, and my friends understand what I mean when say this thing I have made is a poem and that thing I have made is a short story. There are a set of characteristics these labels may imply (and such implications make them useful), but none are required, some may even be mutually exclusive.
There are lots of things that clearly are not poems. Mona Lisa is not a poem. GCC is not a poem. Wikipedia is not a poem. There are also lots of things that clearly are poems.
My claim is not that when you draw a hard boundary these things are technically not poems because they sit just outside the line, but that if you have any sort of boundary at all then they aren't even close.
You say quite rightly that there are sets of characteristics that a label may imply. You don't need all of them, or any particular one, but you need something. Nothing about these "poems" is poetic. They have nothing in common with poetry. And no "evokes feeling" is not a characteristic of poetry, it is a characteristic of art generally. They might be art, but many written things exist that are not art, like short stories and novels.
If I wrote a 70000 word novel and called it a poem, I would obviously be trolling, but by your logic there is no reason it couldn't be. That's just stupid.
>It is a poem because I deign it to be so,
Because to you deign it to be what? What do you deign it to be? You can't just say poem, I am asking you what you mean when you say the word poem. Circular answers will not be accepted.
I would say "evokes feeling" is absolutely a characteristic of a poem. Slam poetry is often characterized by the performance, the visceral experience, more than anything about rhythm, rhyming, or meter.
Epics [1] are one of the oldest forms of poetry. A 70000 word narrative can not only be a poem, such works are some of the oldest artistic expressions in human history.
> Because to you deign it to be what?
A poem. And my friends understand what I mean when I say that. That you don't understand is hardly my concern, like I said I find this amusing, convincing you is not a goal of mine. The purpose of such categories, their only value, is to be understood by the communities which use them. Whether David Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters is art rock or post-punk has no real bearing on the album itself, no value beyond being understood by those discussing it.
We can take this one step further, and say that the community of milesrouts rejects such labels and has a different understanding of these words, a different set of values they choose to express, and this too is a valuable thing to recognize.
Which is what? You cannot define a poem as "a poem" any more than you can define a dog as "a dog" or any other category just as itself.
>And my friends understand what I mean when I say that. That you don't understand is hardly my concern, like I said I find this amusing, convincing you is not a goal of mine.
The Emperor's subjects understood what he meant too, when he was talking about his new outfit.
>The purpose of such categories, their only value, is to be understood by the communities which use them.
And the community as a whole is not serviced by people like you pretending that you have the authority to define every category of things in the English language as meaningless.
>Whether David Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters is art rock or post-punk has no real bearing on the album itself, no value beyond being understood by those discussing it.
Once again you miss the point spectacularly. I specifically said "My claim is not that when you draw a hard boundary these things are technically not poems because they sit just outside the line, but that if you have any sort of boundary at all then they aren't even close."
We are not talking about things that are right on the boundary of what constitutes poetry. They are as close to poetry as a cup of tea is to a glass of milk. "What exactly is tea anyway, it is all subjective, everything is in the eye of the beholder, how can you draw genre boundaries in the medium of liquids, what even is tea anyway?" Total rubbish, and just the same argument you are making.
Epic poetry has specific aspects that make it poetry. It is not ambiguous or difficult to call it poetry. It is clearly poetry. A breathless and stupid rant about politics is not poetry.
The fact you claim that a random HN comment could be a Haiku if the author said it was one, and tried to justify that by the fact that the mora and syllable concepts differ a bit between English and Japanese, shows how completely addled your thinking is. You have followed a stupid ideology so far into the extremes that any sensible person would understand that they have proved their assumptions false by contradiction and gone back to reexamine where they went wrong. You are the sort of person to say "okay, a/b is both in most reduced form and not, at the same time, how wondefully avant garde!"
And sure, some elements of a category can be shared across examples. But there are pretty strong markers, too? And having already a term that describes a type of work, why muddy it by expanding a subset to be descriptive of the whole? Are all humans children? Not just child like, but actual children. All birds are hawks. Book stores are all poetry stores.
So again, what distinguishes poetry from just text? I'm assuming it still has to have a rythm? For that matter, as my sibling said, must it be text? Any art can be poetry? Can I merely deign this post to be both a poem and a portrait?
My guess is you accept that, despite my deigns, this post is none of the things I claimed. But surely I can reject that as fallacy?
Surely, this post is an avante garde example, defying most of the characteristics associated with haikus in form. It can definitively be said to not have the 5-7-5 pattern of traditional Japanese haiku, but in fact all English language haiku deviates from traditional Japanese haiku (a 17 on haiku in Japanese is typically only 12 syllables (note the "typically")).
So you're doing something new and experimental with the form. We can debate the artistic merit, the value of such an experiment. We can argue about what you mean by labeling this a haiku, what message you are trying to convey in the experience of the post. We can even question the sincerity of your motives. But I don't think it's totally invalid, I don't think it can be rejected in the same sense we can reject 2+2=5.
To that end, I would expect an argument against something not being a haiku for having literally no intersection with what it meant for haiku in any language. Not even a seasonal reference. (Though, I confess I did consider throwing one of those in. :D)
Rephrased, this isn't a question of whether a shared essay was artistic. The question is if it is a poem. Well, my question is what separates a poem from prose. But, I think those questions have a shared answer here, as I don't think all shared essays are poems. To that end, I'm genuinely curious what sort of criteria you would have here. Note that, just because I don't think something is a poem, doesn't mean I don't see it as art. Creative essays are still creative. And prose can have a poetic feel, still.
Back to your examples earlier. Yes, rock-n-roll versus country can have some blurs. I don't think that would stop people from rejecting any random album as a country one, if it doesn't at least have some sort of attributes we associate with country.
Now, specifically to your point, I don't necessarily think you should force categories, either. So, if Beyonce doesn't want to say her last album is a country album, I'm fine with that.
You've already accepted that you can't draw any definitive lines, that there is no specific criteria by which you can say a given work does or does not belong to a certain taxa of expression.
Now we're just bartering over how uncomfortable with the vibe you're willing to be. You can't say why Eminem isn't country because you can't really say what "country" is. For any single definitive criteria we could come up with a counter example, so none of it works. You just know it doesn't vibe.
I have no criteria, I recognize that such categories are totally arbitrary and useful only in a very limited scope of suggesting a general set of characteristics in communication between like-minded people, but ultimately hold no exclusionary or binding power.
And frankly, the bartering isn't an interesting discussion. If you want to say the Beastie Boys aren't jazz, more power to you, I probably agree. If you want to say meter is a requirement for poetry, again, whatever floats your boat, but recognize that's just your vibe, your personal ephemeral understanding. These things aren't useful or productive criticisms because they don't have any inherent value.
If someone else says that, in fact, Eraserhead is a RomCom nothing is gained by saying they're wrong other than your own smug satisfaction that you have a superior vibe-o-meter. We can't derive further facts from that rejection. We can't say, "Well we know definitively it is not a RomCom, and therefore it will definitively will or will not possess any of these characteristics".
The only purpose of genre is communication between people who are vibing on the same wavelength. It isn't an objective fact of the universe, it is itself a human expression, saying as much about the taxonomists as the subject of their taxonomy.
And I could easily say that Eminem is not a predominantly country artist because his work is predominantly not country in styling. Just as I can say a cardigan is not a t-shirt. Despite the existence of cardigan shaped t-shirts. Can he also do country music? Of course. Am I going for a David Allan Coe "perfect country western song" in this? Of course not.
You seem to think only things we can mechanically judge would be fair categories. Falling back to math, even. This is why you accept medium as a distinguishing thing. If you were to argue that some points are easier to mechanically distinguish than others, I'd fully agree with you. Just as I'd agree that spelling is more of a social contract than an objective fact. I'd still argue that "wat" is an objective misspelling of "what" in the popular memes. An artistically objective misspelling, but still a misspelling.
Amusingly, I think appealing back to math would be largely where I would go here. Leaving aside that LLMs can almost certainly pick up on differences between prose structure and poem structure; my argument would be that most categorizations are predominantly nearest neighbor calls. Very multidimensional, but also fairly discernable. And sure, some items would be on the outskirts of a cluster, sometimes even between clusters. I'd still say the clusters exist and have major commonalities.
To that end, I think we are at a point I can agree to disagree. I would be with you that some things are largely by agreement of the audience. You lose me when you assert it is at the deign of the artist. (And please note that I'm comfortable with disagreeing here... I'm not trying to persuade you.)
Poetry is art, and art is inherently subjective. Someone's trash is someone else's beautiful work of art. Indeed, I think, with time, I have been able to appreciate art as an art form (in the way it conveys a message, or requires some particular effort or technique, etc) and art as something that simply...touches someone in some way.
So I've found the best poetry to be terrible, and the worst poetry to be incredible. And everything in between. Who am I to truly judge what is good or bad? By which I mean: who is anyone to truly judge what is good or bad? If people find beauty in or are touched by some piece of art (even if the author did not intend it as art), then it is something worthy of that designation — a good piece of art. I guess this is somewhat of a hot take, but it is what it is — just another _thing_. While we're on the topic of things, here is one such other thing — a(n arguably bad) poem on those dastardly things:
Things (09/01/2025)
A thing is what a thing
ought not to be to us.
It ought not to be anything,
other than the thing it was.
If it becomes something different,
then it was never something.
And, then, it knows it's indifferent
— for it knows not it's a thing.
We know not of it, either
— how can we be sure it is?
Could it not just be a fever,
or another thing like this?
I pay no mind to such things,
nor do I pay any feelings.
In fact, I pay no mind to anything
— and isn't that quite the thing?> What's lost in this shift from private contemplation to public performance is the slow work of developing aesthetic judgment.
This pairing of poem and criticism is an important step towards aesthetic judgement. It raises difficult questions. They think it's stupid. Do I? Do I because they told me not to like it? How does it make me feel?
Most people ask "What is poetry?". Maybe a better question would be: "Why does every human language have poetry within it?"
[1] https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/monkeys-learn-to-sin...
But I’d also encourage you to think about the deeper meaning. Is “if you don’t enjoy writing papers, you aren’t enjoying life” really a fair assessment? Does mixing your mundane life with confronting genocide give the appropriate respect to such a weighty topic?
That's why I like this poem. In its stream-of-consciousness way, it points out that we are unable to give that topic the respect it deserves because we don't have the luxury of escaping all of the other mundanities of our life.
In both cases I personally found the sentiment trite, the structure nonexistent, the vocabulary limited, and the imagery anemic, so I am curious to hear a different perspective.
"Laundry to do..." is a trauma dump for pretty much everyone in this third decade of 24/7 local/global disaster reporting. It's the opposite of a unique perspective. But, it's nice to see the common vent presented in a thoughtful way instead of the daily routine of "Everyone holding it in and a few people explosively word-vomiting frustration."
And, I don't need rigid structure, impressive vocab or flowery images to appreciate a message. I'm good with it just putting me in a moment. Feeling it. Taking a breath and exhaling "yessssss......"
This used to be called a whinge. It wasn't celebrated. I wrote out a longer reply but ... idk, I'm astonished at the idea that that "poem" is "presented in a thoughtful way" instead of being "explosive word vomit" when "explosive word vomit" is, as yet, the most accurate three-word description of it I have seen so far. And the idea that the "daily routine" is "Everyone holding it in" is just mad. I can see why people say we exist in a post-fact world where people are speaking past one another. From my perspective nobody has held it in less than people today, over matters so trivial and misunderstood. People cry on Twitter over someone not wearing a mask on public transport, yet people went to the trenches and saw 90% of the male inhabitants of their village killed in front of them and held it together for King and country, went back home and lived normal lives. And the ones that wrote poetry about it wrote actual poetry, good poetry. Not this tat.
>And, I don't need rigid structure, impressive vocab or flowery images to appreciate a message. I'm good with it just putting me in a moment
That doesn't make it a poem!
Back in the days of king and country, people went through all that, went home, and some lived normal lives. A whole lot hid in that trauma from the neighbors and instead took it out on their families because it wasn't acceptable to let it out to anyone else. Everything was "great". That's how it's remembered decades later. That’s how we got a lot of boomers raised by dads who never got therapy.
Recently, in the days of plague, while millions actually suffered and died, a person in a million cried out online about masks. That's 350 a day in the US alone. And, everyone around the world got to watch. How it's remembered today is every one of us saw at least one of them break down and it still sticks with us all.
> This used to be called a whinge. It wasn't celebrated
And, this piece certainly is not a celebration.
The difference between a whinge and a trauma dump is significant here. You should whinge with your buddies occasionally. Not so much you become annoying. Trauma should only be dumped on people who are professionally prepared to help you through it. But, a whole lot of people don’t find prepared help for a whole lot of reasons. Instead they dump it on unprepared strangers. Frequently. Randomly. Commonly. Thus, the term.
> "explosive word vomit" is, as yet, the most accurate three-word description of it I have seen so far.
A trauma dump is usually explosive word vomit. Random chain of thought. But, consider the possibility that this piece was crafted carefully. I know it’s easy to dismiss out of hand. But, try. Why is each sentence there?
> That doesn’t make it a poem!
I’ll grant there is not a lot of structure to be found here. It’s free verse without the line breaks. Not really prose. It’s not telling a story. There’s a beginning. There’s a state of frustration, compassion, boredom, despair, and a loop back to the beginning. Over and over. For decades and counting. That’s the structure. It’s no iambic pentameter. But, it’s something.
But, impressive vocabulary and flowery visuals? Really? I’m going to assume you are flexible there and don’t require a high school English class interpretation of poetry. As called out in the article.
I liked the first one less.
It would be fun to take this author’s formula and have a worst-viral poem writing contest.
Perhaps the only worthwhile contribution to the utterly dead field of 21st century poetry.
"Few of Twitter's most vocal posters spend time reading contemporary poetry collections, attending readings, or tracing the evolution of forms."
Have you tried making "art" that can stand on its own and doesn't require sustained brainwashing to be "enjoyed".
Take the first poem talked about in OP’s article and one of the comments: “humans working hard to prove that they can make art that’s somehow even worse than AI slop.” I see this sort of comment a lot and I’m not saying that’s wrong at all – undoubtedly the vast vast majority of AI “content” is truly “slop.”
But I’ve also believed that genAI could be thought of like an instrument. Most music played on a piano or a synth or a guitar is slop; but it undoubtedly allows for music to be made that would otherwise not exist. I hope the same can be said of Suno (or whatever – hopefully opensourced alternative - follows).
And here’s one of my attempts, a song about the ethics of making music with the machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w5HBrMenZM
The medium is the message. Again.
> People seem to not realize that poetry isn't just a thing you can do. It requires knowledge of form and structure, and of course some amount of talent
It's very much just a thing that you can do. Doing it well may be an art, but simply doing it is a humanity.
"Knowledge of form and structure" is a pretty circular standard, like many aesthetic standards. Form and structure become established by becoming established forms and structures -- matters of meter and certain symmetries may have something of a longer standing but the sonnet isn't a cosmic constant. Form is arguably one of the cheaper ways of making poetry.
Brilliance among post-structural poets is uncontroversial at this point. Authors like Wendell Berry might make a case for the use of old forms (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/18/wendell-berry-poet... ) and that's certainly worth understanding for practitioners of the arts of words or living, but that doesn't mean everything else isn't poetry (as Berry himself implicitly acknowledges in his own poetry).
Talent helps but sometimes you build up talent. Most people aren't Keats or Cummings from the get go.
> they fail to appreciate that the sentiments it expresses are also hackneyed and trite
So are sunsets and love.
I appreciate novelty and sophistication as much as the next guy, maybe more. I can even see not thinking these poems are particularly "good" by some set of aesthetic standards and I might even be interested in that kind of criticism.
But I also understand that what art is for is bigger than living up to that. To quote Ursula K Le Guin:
> I want to revalue the word "art" so that when I come back as I do now to talking about words it is in the context of the great arts of living, of the woman carrying the basket of bread, bearing gifts, goods. Art not as some ejaculative act of ego but as a way, a skillful and powerful way of being in the world.
I don't think the Krishnan laundry genocide poem is good poetry, but ... good for what? It was good at getting something out of the author, it was good at speaking to the divide between knowledge of a high profile horror and the work of every day living, and for touching on that feeling among readers.
The fact that it doesn't hit my various aesthetic / form markers is orthogonal to that.
Me, I am simple
Haiku poems fit me best
Refrigerator Imagination
is an old washing machine
that never breaks