The Poetry Reader and Media: Once More, With Feeling

Poets: don't they love repetition?

Perhaps all writers do. Bloggers included. I have begun one too many essays convinced that this time I would finally write a different take on poetry. That vast, quasi-abstract subject that resists containment. Each attempt risks saying too little, or worse, saying something that life (or my future self) will prove wrong.

When the subject is poetry itself, you are almost destined to fall short.

The fortunate thing is that poetry does not demand perfection. It asks for feeling.

Yes, great poems may rise through structure, meter, discipline, and striking imagery. But what most good poems share — perhaps all — is their ability to draw emotion from us, to pull blood from a turnip.

Of course, this assumes we know what “good poetry” is. Definitions abound. Still, I suspect that sometimes it is enough simply to feel what good poetry is, at least for today.

As Joel Uili observed:

“They'll tell you that the arts and humanities aren't practical and then read poetry at funerals and weddings, cry over films and search for meaning in ancient philosophy. Surviving is one type of practicality, knowing why we bother is another.”

Perhaps no one articulated poetry’s necessity more powerfully than Audre Lorde. In The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, she asks:

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day… until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

Poetry, for Lorde, is illumination. It gives shape to what is already felt but not yet named. Silence is not protective. Expression, however fragile, is transformative.

I do not remember many poems word for word. A few were memorised in childhood through sheer repetition. But mostly I remember poems — and poets — by the way they made me feel. I remember intensity. Atmosphere.

Those images have a sticky quality. They do not let go.

One such image comes from “Zero Gravity” by Eric Gamalinda: a world seen through the blue glow of an old television set, heavy Manila air pressing in, the moon landing shimmering as a symbol of a future we once believed in. I cannot always recite the lines, but I carry the feeling.

Poetry often works this way — closer, at times, to visual art than to long-form prose. It tells stories obliquely. It teaches us how much can depend upon small, ordinary things.

As William Carlos Williams wrote in The Red Wheelbarrow:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Where Poetry Lives Now

It feels almost profane to materialise something as abstract and luminous as poetry. Yet we must ask: where do we find it?

The traditional answers remain: books, anthologies, literary journals, magazines. But poetry also thrives online: websites, digital publications, and social media platforms, from Tumblr to Instagram and beyond.

There are further corners still: bardic songs, meditative traditions, spoken word performances, song lyrics, and hybrid multimedia forms.

Despite debate — and despite certain standards some hold tightly — poetry does not truly follow a hierarchy. It exists wherever language becomes charged with intention and feeling.

It can illuminate the sacred or the profane.

Two recent favourites of mine, for example, are unapologetically about sex: Fucking in Cornwall by Ella Frears — physical, sensual, rough-edged — and After The Threesome They Both Take You Home by Sue Hyon Bae — nostalgic, delicate, longing.

I discovered both on Pinterest.

That detail alone says something about the modern poetry reader.

Depending on the week I might have written this essay, my examples would be different. Poetry shifts with us. It meets the season of our lives.

From Hold Out Your Arms by Helen Dunmore:

A mother will always lift a child

As a rhizome

Must lift up a flower

The metaphor settles somewhere deep. It does not require analysis to resonate.

New Media, New Voices

The amplification of poetry through new media — still niche, but expanding — has opened space for experimentation and for voices historically marginalised. Free form, hybrid styles, personal confession, and political urgency all reflect the texture of contemporary life.

Not all celebrate these changes. Some miss strict formalism. Others feel social media has diluted poetic craft. These concerns are not always baseless.

Yet one of the greatest gifts of modern poetry is the widening spectrum of voices and the platforms through which they travel.

Across the world, poets from diasporic and Indigenous communities use language to articulate identity, struggle, beauty, and survival. In Australia, powerful work emerges from Aboriginal poets, including collections such as The Body Country by Susie Anderson and initiatives like BECAUSE OF HER, WE CAN curated by Red Room Poetry.

From Evelyn Araluen:

then the stars come here

to shine the shape of song

The power of voice travels globally. In Italy, Giuseppe Ungaretti captured wartime fragility in Soldati:

It feels like

in autumn

on branches

the leaves

Whether we speak or remain silent, fear remains. We still meet our end. But expression transforms fear into meaning.

Would Audre Lorde approve of guarding poetry’s “purity” while denying others the right to write? To call themselves poets?

So let

them

write.

And let others

read.

Poetry Beyond the Page

The modern reader encounters poetry differently. Film and television weave it into narrative: Paterson, Bright Star (on John Keats), A Quiet Passion (on Emily Dickinson), Vita & Virginia, Poetry. Series like Dickinson and projects such as Ours Poetica bring poems into audio-visual space.

Even Instapoetry — including the work of Rupi Kaur — has expanded poetry’s reach. The boundaries of what makes a poem a poem have always been porous.

I have found work I cherish through Pinterest, through social media writers like Jarod K. Anderson (The Crypto Naturalist), and through spoken word artists such as Andrea Gibson, whose performances brought many readers into poetry for the first time.

From Gibson’s posthumous poem:

I used to believe I knew my purpose…

But my calling, I now know, has always been

this: to parent my own departure.

Once More, With Feeling

It may not change the world whether there are more or fewer poets. But it changes lives. It changes mine.

Poetry adds colour to memory. It shapes how we understand love, despair, longing, resistance, and joy. Across centuries, it has evolved into more forms and hues than almost any other art, perhaps rivalled only by music.

But to keep the flame alive, poetry must be read.

Again and again.