There is no Place for Poetry Here
“How many claps an article, poem, or story gets is not an indication of how good it is, but an indication of how skilled the writer is at self-promotion and their participation in Medium clap clubs.”
Despite being one of the most popular topics on Medium (#7 here, #4 here, #5 here, #6 here, and overall #3 here with only ‘startups’ and ‘politics’ being higher) there doesn’t seem to be much interest in actually reading the poetry found on Medium.
Thus, disproving the popular notion that using the most popular tags will increase your readership. And the ‘medium’ tag, known for producing lots of readers, is hardly used at all, having only 28,000 followers according to this list.
Again, using popular tags will not increase your exposure. As a matter of fact, this seems to prove that using the most popular tags is detrimental to your readership as your post only gets buried under, according to this list, 487K other writers.
As it turns out, and just as I’ve long known, the most popular writers on Medium just as everywhere, are most popular because they are the most popular, having been here and stuck it out the longest. The same is true everywhere. This was a relatively easy task for the early adopters but the rest of us can expect the natural process to take years, decades perhaps. Me, I’ll not live that long.
The Medium website isn’t conducive to poetry. Besides not being able to center text, to make the most money on Medium one must “properly” format what you post here using titles, subtitles, and photographs. You must pad your poetry with explanations and stories. James Joyce never explained his poetry. Neither did Edgar Allen Poe, William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, and my all-time favorite, Shel Silverstein. Great poets don’t explain their poetry as great poetry explains itself. It simply isn’t done.
I was taught that great poetry is concise, and yet I was once told by a poetry publication owner here at Medium that my poem needed subtitle, photographs, and an explanation before it would be published. Never mind that the poem in question was deliberately the worst I’ve ever written, she was willing to “publish” it provided I fill in the blanks. Most of the poetry published here is rambling, incoherent, and often boring. Why would anyone want to read it?
Then there’s the email subscribers who are able to read entire poems without ever clicking through to Medium, thus earning poets nothing for their reads. Talk about a slap in the face.
Then there are claps. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, William Wordsworth, Lewis Carroll, Lord Byron, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Alighieri, Ezra Pound, Sappho, John Milton, and Homer never depended on a false metric known as “claps”.Why should we be subject to such torture today. Honestly, I have to force myself to “clap” for the rest of you as doing so simply isn’t what I’m prone to do. And while I can’t claim to be great you can take note of the fact that few great writers are social creatures as socializing and writing must compete for time.
How many claps an article, poem, or story gets is not an indication of how good it is, but an indication of how skilled the writer is at self-promotion and their participation in Medium clap clubs. Medium allows this as they wish to encourage page views thus making Medium attractive to potential investors. I used to self promote many years ago but always felt dirtied, and was often demeaned for doing so. Today I just write and nothing more.
Poetry has long been a part of our culture. Poetry was used to teach children, even illiterate children, life skills. Headmasters recited poetic recipes and how to poems written in rhyming verse to little girls who weren’t allowed to learn to read, and the girls memorized these rhymes to use for the rest of their lives. Even Shakespeare wrote rhyming recipes. Now that’s evergreen.
Lots of writers here at Medium and elsewhere tell us that to be successful one must post only evergreen content. Poetry is as evergreen as it gets. Don’t believe me? Look at all those names in the paragraphs above and tell me poetry isn’t evergreen content. I’ll not be remembered for spending 2 weeks writing the most comprehensive listical of amazing materials ever written, but I might be remembered for a poem I wrote. (Note the ‘might.’)
Poetry has long been a part of our culture. Poetry was used to teach children, even illiterate children, life skills. Headmasters recited recipes and how to poems written in rhyming verse to little girls who weren’t allowed to learn to read, and the girls memorized these rhymes to use for the rest of their lives. Poetry is still used by teachers to train their students.
“Further, nursery rhymes help kids to improve their overall language skills. It gives them the power of playfully manipulating their language, which again gives them a sort of “permission” to influence language in other several ways. Studies show that children have more ownership over their language when they’re encouraged to change it and play with how they speak.
Another area where rhyming is important is the area of what is called “phonemic awareness.” “Phonemic awareness” lays the foundation for language that is written. Teaching Nursery Rhymes is a forerunner to learning how to not only read but also write.
Plus Nursery rhyming is also a lot of fun. It not only engages the academic capabilities of children but in the process also make the whole procedure of learning fun. Further, nursery rhymes also allow kids to throw in their own nonsensical words, which make the matter all the more interesting!”
There was even a time when poetry was used to report the news as in this 24 Dec, 1921 quote from the Arkansas Democrat.
“Hippety, hippety, hop, A hipster meets a cop, Away, pell mell, To a dungeon cell, Hippety, hippety, hop.”
Imagine how much more fun news presented in this manner must have been.
Great poets leave descriptions of the best and worst there ever was, epic battles, disasters, triumphs, defeats, the gods, satire, love, desire, the things that make humanity what it is.
Yet, what is historically been evergreen content performs horribly here at Medium with the most successful writers here being those persons who almost never publish evergreen content, choosing instead to write about how to make money online, politics, coding techniques that will be outdated in a few years, and rants about the latest social issues.
Today’s social and publishing norms do not take kindly to poets and poetry, treating them as strange curiosities, something they must tolerate in order not to appear to be belligerent and anti-social, but you can bet that 100 years into the future no one will be searching Google for instructions on how to write the coding that was in use in 2022.
Truth be told, it’s always been that way. The bards of long ago were the kept men of kings, queens, and marriages to women with money. Their success at the time was dependant on how long their benefactors remained in power and their skills as jesters. Even William Shakespeare,
“As a husband Shakespeare offered few prospects; his family had fallen into financial ruin, while Hathaway, from a family in good standing both socially and financially, would have been considered a catch.”
The world has never been kind to poets so why should we expert our virtual world to be any different? As a long committed poet who should probably be committed I know these things and accept them as true. Most days.