When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong
Back in November, famous poet Ocean Vuong posted on Instagram a series of ideas about metaphor. The ideas were both smart and incomplete, the sort of theorizing that occurs among fellow artists in a small back room. Another famous poet, Matthew Zapruder, responded by critiquing Vuong’s ideas about metaphor, adding what he thought Vuong was missing: a more avant-garde conceptualization of metaphor that took into account the methodologies of surrealism. Both poets were asserting things that were extensions of their respective aesthetics. I would argue that a larger articulation of how metaphor works emerged from the combination of their ideas—from the conversation they were having—than from either poet’s assertions taken by themselves. In a small back room—say, if Vuong and Zapruder were talking in a bar or coffee shop or someone’s apartment after a reading—all of this would be perfectly fine; this is how the world of the small back room proceeds.
But—and here’s the thing—social media is not a small back room, even in the realm of poetry.
https://lithub.com/when-talking-about-poetry-online-goes-very-wrong/
