It’s tempting to associate poetry strictly with its loftiest notions. Airy meditations on love, death, war, and the human soul abound in an artform known for its relative inaccessibility. It is, to borrow from the phrenologists, “highbrow.”

In other words: we don’t expect poetry to address looksmaxxing, cheuginess, six-seven, Barbenheimer, Brat, or Pokémon. But it can. It does. And it’s so worth doing.

Pop Culture Freewrite

Think of a piece of pop culture that resonates with you or speaks to your current life.

Interpret “pop culture” very widely. It can be a movie, TV show, song or musician, social media trend, slang term, video game, meme, tidbit of celebrity gossip, and plenty more. Think: anything accessible in the common cultural sphere.

In what ways does that piece of pop culture feel like your life right now? Freewrite about your relationship to it and how it might represent or symbolize your present experience of being alive.

Poem: “I’m Like if Mary Oliver Had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” by Rose Zinnia

Retrieved from Queer Poem-a-Day.

            a busted self-blazon / infodump in memes

i’m evolving from sadtrans to joytrans & g-d is my pokémon trainer

i only expect to have a final form by the circumstance of my being

perishable when i enter a room my brain calculates how many ppl might be clocking me & how

i am trying to let wonder & uncertainty dom me every day

sometimes i’m feral napcore audhd hyporheic cloudleaf unmasked pilled

tbh i’m not even trans i’m a sheaf of blessings that makes a soft noise when you strum it

when we trace back our wound to root it becomes unwound it mutates into grace

catch me divinizing the quotidian by becoming obsessed w this river-smoothed stone i found

i fully expect a mycelial network to fall in love w me for some reason

my/your face a coven of we a listening beyond the comprehensible

it is not enough to love the earth i must merge my body w hers entirely

i’m like if love were a kind of esoteric circle that exploded every six months & was also a woman

looking back i’m jealous all my bullies insisted i was a girl before i did

the word bad comes from the old english bæddel meaning hermaphrodite (pejorative)

attention is the beginning of devotion is something mary oliver said

my body being stored within the word bad is a form of devotion

my attention is both deficient & hyperactive i.e. i am touchingfeeling everything constant

devotion is the practice of belonging is something the earth cosplaying as me said

as a joytrans my special pokémon moves are witness & surrender

i think i am just trying to have a nice day most of the time but i am open to bæddel days too

the coolest thing ab me is probably when you google my name

you are met only w flowers

Divinations

My first reaction reading this poem is, oh god, please shut the hell up.

That’s not an indictment of Zinnia or her poem. I just hate being online right now. And this poem is steeped in internet lingo: the -core and -pilled suffixes, Pokémon, meme tweet templates, cosplaying, phone text abbreviations, mental illness as identity, etc. The poem is also populated with many different kinds of knowledge: etymologies, poetry quotes, diagnoses, ecological formations—not unlike the experience of a nerd-aligned Instagram algorithm, or staying up late reading Wikipedia.

The poem’s tagline says it best: “a busted self-blazon” (blazon being the term for describing the coat of arms on a flag); “an infodump in memes.”

But the poem isn’t complicit in that language or the things I find detestable in it—and that’s a protest for a different day. Rather, I see this poem as both resisting the most obnoxious parts of online language and embracing the promises of self-determination that the early internet gave us.

Really, this is a poem of self-actualization, made more ironic by its ability to use the non-actualizing experience of today’s internet language.

A few observations:

1. Every line pulls from a different internet vernacular. We oscillate from what’s droll and ironic to what’s unexpectedly poetic—some lines combining both.
2. The poem’s discovery is not a discovery of insight, but a discovery of voice.
3. The final two lines are the only lines where a thought moves cleanly and grammatically across a line break.

I love the final two lines in part because their epiphany is derived from our relationship to technology. This is a poem about discovering and representing the self online—and this speaker’s self is actually masked by Google Search, “Rose” and “Zinnia” both being flowers. There’s empowerment in both this speaker’s visibility and anonymity. She has found a way to both avow who she is and control how she’s found—on a technology increasingly creepy in its surveillance, omnipresence, and cultural dominance.

Also, I just want to shoutout this line, which is so unexpected that it bowls me over every time:

when we trace back our wound to root it becomes unwound it mutates into grace

I mean, good God. 

Pop Culture in Poetry

I like to think of pop culture as an inciting subject in poetry. It’s a platform from which we can understand something about life in the context of the culture.

Rose Zinnia’s poem is a window into internet life. Speaking as someone in Zinnia’s generation, I also figured out who I was and how I wanted to be by being online. It was much safer to be queer on the internet than queer in real life—but I worry that, for this new generation of technology users, that freedom is harder to find.

A successful pop culture poem will be both in conversation with its subject material and elevated above it: it discovers something more true and humanly felt, some reason why we might gravitate towards whatever we deem “lowbrow.”

Here are a few other examples of pop culture poems I love:

• “Scream Queen Villanelle” by Dustin Brookshire
• “Love Song of the Demogorgon” by Jenny Molberg
• “An Improvement in Stairs” by Mairead Small Staid
• “Pennsylvania Cryptid” by Amelia England
• “Laura Palmer Graduates” by Amy Woolard
• “Asami Writes to Korra for Three Years” by Natalie Wee

Prompt: Writing Pop Culture Poems

Write a pop culture poem! Use features of your chosen media to understand something deeper about yourself and the world around you.