That One Time The Washington Post Bullied Me About Poetry Not Being Dead

For the last few years, I’ve been signing off my author bio with a brief anecdote: “She was once bullied by The Washington Post for blogging about poetry not being dead.” I find it to be a funny throwaway fact that’s probably more interesting than anything goofy I have to say about, like, my cat or whatever else people write in their bios. But I’ve decided that it’s been long enough. It’s time. The world deserves to know.

This is the true story of The Washington Post bullying me about poetry.

The Context

The incident happened in the spring of 2015. I was in my last semester of undergrad at SUNY Geneseo, and was one of the poetry editors for the SUNY-wide undergraduate literary magazine, Gandy Dancer. (It’s a great mag full of incredible young talent, go check it out!) Gandy Dancer is produced semesterly in a publishing workshop offered as an English course, and its production is guided by a faculty advisor and two undergraduate managing editors. As part of the course requirements, each staff member is expected to write at least one post for the Gandy Dancer blog. This is where our story begins.

I’d been exhausted by the “poetry is dead”/“poetry ISN’T dead” argument for a long time, and as a poet myself, I had my own strong opinions on the matter. I got the topic approved for Gandy’s blog by our faculty advisor, and started writing.

The result was a passionate defense of poetry’s timelessness and eternal life, in which my argument boiled down to the notion that poetry exists so long as people continue to talk about it—which includes the ongoing bickering about whether or not poetry is dead.

If you have to keep declaring, over and over, that poetry is dead, it can’t actually be dead.

I felt good about myself after writing the blog, which you can read in full here. I was proud of my argument and the way that I articulated it. I’m still proud of it, honestly, even though I realized a few years later that there was a mathematical error in the first paragraph that somehow went undetected all this time. Whatever, I’m not a math person anyway. The point is, in the blog, I linked to multiple other sites and articles about the “poetry is dead” argument…one of which had been published by The Washington Post two years earlier.

My blog was posted on the Gandy Dancer blog in April of 2015, to celebrate National Poetry Month. It was pretty quiet and uneventful at first. But then things got interesting.

The Critique

Two and a half weeks after Gandy published my blog, one of its previous managing editors alerted me to an article. Shortly after, I got an email from our faculty advisor with the same link. It was a WaPo article. The WaPo article.

The journalist cited my main pullquote and proceeded to use data from surveys and Google Analytics to prove me wrong, arguing that fewer people are reading poetry than ever and that public interest in it as a medium is dwindling. The data and its interpretation, as my classmates and colleagues would later reaffirm, was rather weak and failed to account for a vast number of variables. A simple Google search of the word “poetry” doesn’t even scratch the surface of how many different ways people are experiencing poetry these days. Button Poetry, for example, has gained significant attention across the world thanks to their poetry performance videos, which often go viral. Many poets, like Rupi Kaur, have found success by sharing their work on Tumblr and Instagram (with the “social media poet” phenomenon being subject to much discourse of its own). And when people search for poetry online, they’re more likely to seek out the literary journals, authors, and presses that publish work they’re interested in rather than cast the single word “poetry” into Google and hope they catch something good. The data was obviously cherry-picked.

The greatest irony, though, was that the journalist had completely missed my point. My assertion was that continuing to talk about poetry, even in “poetry is dead” arguments, is what keeps it alive. His attempt to paint poetry as a medium on the way to extinction…well, required him to talk about it. In trying to refute my claims, he ended up proving them.

And then the internet did its thing.

The Conversation

I am going to be completely honest with you all. When I first heard about the WaPo article, I freaked out. I mean totally overcome with terror. It was great that Gandy Dancer was getting such wide publicity, but—gotta love having an anxiety disorder!—I took the article maybe a little too personally, and started having intrusive thoughts about getting hate mail from internet trolls. Getting very publically criticized by a major national publication was more than I ever expected as a 21-year-old college senior who was just writing an assignment for class, and I didn’t know how to process it. So my fight-or-flight kicked on. In my panic, I asked to have my name removed from the Gandy blog post, so that I wouldn’t be in any lines of fire.

But with every declaration of the ‘death of poetry,’ hundreds of poets fly in to defend the genre and prove the naysayers wrong.

As the WaPo article began to circle the poetsphere, the defenders of poetry that I alluded to in my original blog emerged from their hiding places in libraries, bookstores, and Twitter. I kept tabs on the convo, as I am wont to do, because I am as curious as I am a masochist. I was bracing for the worst. But the reactions were so much better than I expected.

As I lurked on social media, I saw countless poets and writers expanding on my points in ways I would’ve never thought of. Defending poetry as poets do. It was nothing short of amazing. At this point, it wasn’t one journalist against one small student, but a phalanx of writers championing the arts. I felt defended, protected, part of a community. But at this point, it wasn’t about me. It was never about me, really. I just got caught up in all of it.

The WaPo journalist didn’t engage much in conversation about the article, but I did notice that he kept “liking” posts that were in conversation about it, even if they were arguing against him. I eventually realized that he probably wasn’t responding because he didn’t actually have any stake in his argument. He was a data guy, probably just trying to meet a quota and get his paycheck. After coming to terms with this, his response to my blog didn’t feel nearly as scary.

My name, and even Gandy’s, disappeared beneath the greater discussion of poetry, who reads it, and why it isn’t dead. Eventually, the fervor quieted down, and so did my anxiety. I added my name back to the blog’s byline. The poets and writers retreated back into their books until the next bout of poetry discourse emerged. Once again, the cycle of defense continued. Poetry: confirmed not dead.

The Conclusion?

Three years have passed since that fateful cyber-encounter. Since then, I’ve gotten a Master of Fine Arts in poetry. The “is poetry dead?” argument has gone around the ringer a few more times. I still stand by what I said in 2015. Gandy Dancer is in its seventh year and still growing. You can draw your own conclusions about The Washington Post.

My brief clash with WaPo was ultimately nothing more than a small blip on the radar of the literary and arts community. If anything, it was just a somewhat strange experience that I naively blew out of proportion. I still like putting it in my author bio.

There will always be more to be said about poetry. That feels pertinent, too, since much of poetry itself is conversation. Poetry is, and will always be, bigger than poets. As it should be.

Frankly, I’m glad. Let’s keep talking. It’s a matter of life or death.

 

For more information about Gandy Dancer, please visit gandydancer.org.

I claim no relationship, professional or personal, with The Washington Post.