They invited us to impersonate humans on their platforms and we accepted their invitation. Our poets are no exception; the poets are committed to this enterprise. In addition to sharing their poet thoughts and poet images online, poets circulate the poetry world too, including poet poems, poet news, and poet gossip. The infinite scroll of poet produced content, animated by user engagement, has now taken on the character of poet noise. Because of poet platforms, never in the history of literature are we more aware of the poet as a living person, and yet we intuitively know they are impersonating a living person. We know poet and we don’t know poet at all, but what we understand is poet wants something from us and we give it to them (while always secretly wanting the same in return). As a result, the poetry world (poets, poems, presses, institutions, journals) has mutated into a freakish and widespread stupidity.
We would hope a true work of poetry, full of poems, could remain uncorrupted; that a poem could still be read purely as a poem (can we recall what this even means?) and resist the poet system of poet simulations and poet datascape subjectivities, but the poem on the page now impersonates a poet poem on the page, and its poet words, like the poet text found on poet platforms, are merely the same poet noise, telegraphing the same poet desire we find displayed by poets:
value…me…
Poet poems are no longer satisfied with simply being read: they’re eager to be poet photographed, poet shared, poet liked, and poet celebrated. When our offline eyes meet the poet poem on the offline poet page, an uncommodified (poet sorry about that), meaningful exchange is no longer possible because we sense immediately—the poet words of the poet poem actually signal this poet potential—that we can utilize the poet poem (and the poet who wrote it) to enhance our human impersonations online. The potential for poet sharability is always poet present in the poet process of reading a poet poem now, even in poet books, which manufacture the conditions for an emergent shallow literacy to poet appear, a type of cognitive poet regime that fragments our poet attention and deranges a poem’s communicative nature.
The only way to rescue poems from poets is to decouple ourselves entirely from the poet platforms poets use; we must poet dissolve into concrete poet geographies, beyond poet media reach, those poet spaces that remain sensually poet private and poet anonymous and known only to poet selves and our real poet companions. We must run and hide from getting poet liked and getting poet shared. By reaching less people, we will eventually reach more people. By being out of touch with the poet poetry world, we will touch the poetry world even more. By seeing less poet poems, we will read more poems.
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JOHN EBERSOLE is co-editor of Tourniquet Review. He lives in Houston, Texas.