I don't want to write Instagrammable poetry, ok? I want to be bathed in blood.

(And also a thank you to The Poetry Vessel podcast for featuring my poem)

In the midst of my many-week convalescence with mononucleosis—during which I lived in a perpetual silent malaise, walking no further than from bed to kitchen sink and back again, as though I’d vanished from the world itself—I woke up to a delight:

The Poetry Vessel video podcast, a true gem, featured one of my poems, SAINT OF THE QUIET ENDLESS BURN from my book, SAINT OF.

Let me tell you about the podcast itself, as it’s a wondrous thing. It’s hosted by Nathan Hassall, the Poet Laureate of Malibu. Episodes cover topics like Carl Jung and poetry, struggling with creative doubt, the neuroscience of poetics (aka, the “intuitive capabilities held within the vessels of our bodies”— yes, please), a poem for the LA wildfires, and so much more. Nathan is also a tip-top reader, which is the bonus of all bonuses.

In the episode covering my poetry, “Did We Summon a GHOST with a Poem?” Nathan and his wife, co-host Rachael Hassall, deep dive into my poem (they ask questions like, “Is this a poet’s love story?” I won’t ever tell!), while exploring its language, interrogations, and use of punctuation. They also made a gorgeous video out of the poem itself (huge thanks!).

They also tell spectral stories of their visit to England (where Nathan was raised). They visit a graveyard and bring home a ghost. They discuss Duende, how poetry changes our brains, Shelley, Romanticism, and the strangeness and mystery of poetry.

“The best poetry defies full explanation,” Nathan says.

I agree. Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of the poet these days—and where strangeness fits into it all. (PS, The Poetry Vessell devoted an episode to strangeness in poetry, and the “numinous dark”).

I wonder, what is poetry expected to do for people? These days, we must be more than ourselves; we must also be avatars. We have to contend with the nonstop provocations and pressures: numbers, likes, self as brand, platform as proof of concept.

Poets especially feel a pressure to produce content—short poems, shareable lines, 20 slides that mix the profound with the irreverent; we must be professional enough to be taken seriously but aloof enough to seem cool. Our poems have to fit on screen, too, because fuck the lineation, right?

And preferably, the poems must be digestable by the masses. They must elicit cheap emotional responses. They must performatively tap into a zeitgeist or adhere to an aesthetic. They must be written with virality in mind.

But I want to be messy, to disappear sometimes, to be a fucking weirdo, to take up the whole page, to write rambling pieces like this one, to not be platform-perfect.

I don’t want to write a poem while thinking, “This is the kind of line Tumblr will get their hands on” (although it’s happened to me, and it’s very bizarre).

Of course, it’s not inherently bad (although I can already hear the “you’re an elitist” peanut gallery marching in). I am not a traditionalist. I am not a purist by any stretch. Culture shifts, and people come to art for different reasons. But what do we sacrifice when we write toward clicks and not toward the occult experience of it all?

I don’t believe poetry should perform mystery or deny clarity; rather, it simply shouldn’t force itself to accommodate mass appeal.

In a world where information is a click away, where AI threatens creative industry, and where instant gratification is the norm, I crave madness and weirdness. I crave big fucking language with a thousand doorways but no way out. Give me baroque or give me death! I want it bad. I want to read it and write it.

I want trickery, mystery, the unexplainable. I want poems that aren’t Instagrammable. I want to be bathed in blood. I don’t need poets to explain themselves, to write easy, to give me the keys, or to give me consolation. I am not even sure I come to poetry for consolation.

I think I come to poetry for the ineffable, really. The feeling that I’ve been splintered but can’t quite pull it out. I love the mental glitch, my mind a record skipping: What does this mean? I want, like Nathan says, to be haunted. I want to be able to excavate my own sapphires.

Maybe that’s the consolation? That we keep coming back, writing, reading, asking questions, hoping for a deeper and longer glimpse into the dark numinous, the endless well. The muddy stuff that isn’t made for tractable consumption.

Love your work, poets. Love it as it is, not as a molded thing.

Fortunately, as an editor, I read hundreds of submissions every month for Luna Luna. And for every handful of poems that dip me into the well only to explain I’ve been dipped into the well, there are dozens more that embrace an addictive haze. (There are so many great poets out there).

I think of a 2017 essay To Vibrebrate: In Defense of Strangeness by Johannes Göransson (whose poetry is among my very favorites) written in response to Matthew Zapruder’s essay, Understanding Poetry is More Straightforward Than You Think.

In it, Göransson tackles the dominant dismissal of the excessive and the strange:

“If we can leave behind the constant injunction of our gatekeepers and tastemakers to comply with aesthetics of the “straightforward,” we can embrace intense meadows and ecstatic riddles. Jäderlund, Hopkins, Zurita, Lynch, Jefferson all offer a different route, an ecstatic, visionary route that says: poetry is a strange force that can take over your minds and bodies, transport you out of what you think you know and take you into a new kind of mysterious knowledge.

Write what you don’t know.”

Now, please watch the episode and enjoy the podcast (ps, you can submit your own poems to be featured at The Poetry Vessel). And thanks again to Nathan and Rachael: