Even though I’m aware of how unlikely it is for my poems — written by an undergrad who just started writing two years ago — to be accepted by well-known literary magazines, a delicate sourness still arose in me when I saw my submission status turn from a hopeful blue “In-progress” to a dull grey “Rejected” on Submittable. I submitted the poems in December last year; it was October when I received the form rejection.
Ten months is nothing if you ask more seasoned writers. I have seen on social media writers celebrating a tiered rejection after a two-year wait—meaning the work is not going to be published, but the editors acknowledge its quality with specific comments in their response. Two years, being one-tenth of how long I’ve lived, seems a lot. After I’m done workshopping a poem, I’m always in a rush to get it out into the world, while the proverbial ink (and perhaps the proverbial wound that inspired the poem) is still fresh.
The answer to my dilemma seems simple — why don’t I just post the poems myself? That’s what social media is for. One obvious reason is that work published in journals and magazines will reach more people, and those publications’ subscribers are people who have long taken to poetry. Then there’s the fear of exposing myself—what if my personal turmoil or my most recent epiphany are commonplace, their delivery clumsy and derivative? No, I must wait for the keen eyes of an editor to approve my writing before it is introduced to an audience.
The writers under the hashtag #poetsoftiktok or #poetrytok are, thus, much braver than I am. In mood lighting that resembles a sunset glow or the bottom of the ocean, they deliver their poetry, eyes gazing either to the side, presumably to some screen, or straight into the camera, maintaining intimate eye contact with the audience. The music kicks in: If you are not sure how you are supposed to feel, the background music of “Sparks” by Coldplay should help you out.
Most of the TikTok poems fall into a handful of categories. One is the manic pixie dream life coach, in which the poems shout out a string of short imperatives urging the readers to carpe diem, each one a little quirkier than the last. Sing in the shower. Take up space, like sunlight, or like an elephant. Stuff your mouth with grapes. Steal a baby goose. That’s how to live life to its full bloom. And then there’s the lovergirl poems, in which the narrator declares their desire to be loved the right way, or admonishes a negligent past lover, often replete with lexicon trending in internet relationship discourse, such as avoidant/anxious (stemming from attachment theory), yearners, “as my final act of love I will…”. Meditation podcast is also a popular category. While scrolling through a hodge-podge of short-form content, you can pause for a mindful minute for pocket-sized advice telling you to live slow and immerse in a variety of familiar small pleasures — a cup of tea, the warmth of a scarf, sunlight passing through leaves, and so on — rendering the poem a description of a Pinterest moodboard. There are, of course, TikTok poets who strive for more complex work and venture outside of these categories. However, the poems that attract the most attention are more likely than not to fall into these particularly reproducible formats.
People who come across these poems seem deeply moved by them. To cite a couple of comments I found: “Your words are the paint. Your voice the brush. The pictures you paint are of pain and wanted love,” “The first line should be illegal I am not okay,” “You’re the girlies’ Shakespeare.” Shaken by the poem’s relatability (a feature of TikTok poetry that is often mentioned and lauded in the comments section), some feel compelled to spill out an intimate account of their most recent heartbreak, turning the comment section into a virtual group therapy circle. Clearly, these videos offer therapeutic values, which some might argue is a sufficient accomplishment of poetry.
On encountering Poetrytok, people who are not in the habit of reading poetry can quickly absorb spoken words that stir in them a memory, a feeling of comfort, or some brief reflection on love for the entire one minute the video lasts before scrolling onto another. Their encounter with poetry is unmediated by any publication. On the other side of the screen, writers can share their work without having to spend years waiting for the approval of literary magazines and journals. Using the right tricks, a video can capture the audience in the first 3 seconds. Then, the algorithm might bless it by showing it to millions of people – a reach far more impressive than the traditional publication route. TikTok, then, is a key player in the democratisation of poetry, for both writers and readers.
I wonder if some of the poems that I turn to from time to time — out of fascination, a desire for solace, or a need for guidance — would have done well if they had made their introduction to the world via TikTok. If a TikTok poet were to write “The Red Wheelbarrow,” would a video of a reborn William Carlos Williams slowly enunciating every syllable of the 16-word poem somehow blow up? “[We were so poor]” by Charles Simic is short and plainly-worded enough, and perhaps the first sentence can elicit amusement and attention — “We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap.” If we want to be optimistic, maybe a handful of scrollers will pause and give the contrast between surreal sparks at the end and the quotidian setting of poverty some thought. Anne Carson’s thirty-eight-page “The Glass Essay,” interweaving three narrative threads — the narrator’s visit to her mom, musings on Emily Bronte and her book Wuthering Heights, and the aftermath of the narrator and her past lover —certainly won’t make the cut due to its length. And what about Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost of collection, which, using the family photographs that her late brother cut himself out of, fills words into those voids? How can one read out the poems while delivering such a poignant formal choice?
These poems stayed with me for so long because I have spent time with them, reading with fingertips pausing at certain words as if the tactile contact would reveal their meaning to me, thinking about them while walking somewhere with no headphones on. Whatever eludes me doesn’t frustrate me. In an interview with The Guardian, former Oxford professor and poet Geoffrey Hill contended that “Difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. If you write as if you had to placate or in any way entice their lack of interest, then I think you are making condescending assumptions about people.” Poems that initially keep you at arm’s length but slowly reveal themselves to you, instead of immediately pulling you in for a quick hug and releasing you, are the ones that respect and trust you as a friend. And, like a life-long friend, they are patient — every elusive element of the poems is an open-arm invitation to come back as you grow older and gain clarity of what was once obscured by youth. It’s the time that you are able to spend with a poem, whether writing or reading it, that will enrich you.
This is not to say that there are no poets on TikTok who share challenging and experimental work, or poets who make use of the video form to create multi-media poetry. But the truth is, the platform rewards poems that reiterate the same exhausted sentiments, packaged in digestible wording. If you want poems that make a friend out of you, there are better places to look.
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke advises a nineteen-year-old writer to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” This advice should prove valuable to both writers and readers of poetry. The heart is vast and contains unresolved feelings that cannot be flattened into easy writing that is spoon-fed to its audience with the aid of schmaltzy background music, repetitive metaphors, and unimaginative word choices. To seek out and create poetry that challenges you is to honour the unresolved and do the heart justice.