Poetry adapts. It can permeate every medium, play with every medium, turn every medium into its proper form. There is no need for a theoretical underpinning. Poetry can.
But poetry can not just “be”. It has to happen, too. All the efforts to put poetry on the street, among the ‘normal people’ hinge on what happens in the normal people’s minds. Poetry must happen there.
The greatest enemy of poetry is the scroll, the mind-numbing finger-movement of social media users to pass ‘content’ in front of their gaze, for their instant gratification. This gratification is hardly caused by the quality of the image on their retinas, but rather by how good that image functions as a token of gratification. How well does it invoke associative patterns? Does it make the viewer (we can hardly speak of readers) feel good about herself?
I have sought out the scroll and published a number of very short poems on my Instagram account. Could poetry have happened behind the beholder’s gaze? What do you think?
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