Some of those tweet criticisms gets the side eye from me: > People seem to not realize that poetry isn't just a thing you can do. It requires knowledge of form

Some of those tweet criticisms gets the side eye from me: > People seem to not realize that poetry isn't just a thing you can do. It requires knowledge of form and structure, and of course some amount of talent It's very much just a thing that you can do. Doing it well may be an art, but simply doing it is a humanity. "Knowledge of form and structure" is a pretty circular standard, like many aesthetic standards. Form and structure become established by becoming established forms and structures -- matters of meter and certain symmetries may have something of a longer standing but the sonnet isn't a cosmic constant. Form is arguably one of the cheaper ways of making poetry. Brilliance among post-structural poets is uncontroversial at this point. Authors like Wendell Berry might make a case for the use of old forms (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/18/wendell-berry-poetry-marriage/ https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/18/wendell-berry-poet... ) and that's certainly worth understanding for practitioners of the arts of words or living, but that doesn't mean everything else isn't poetry (as Berry himself implicitly acknowledges in his own poetry). Talent helps but sometimes you build up talent. Most people aren't Keats or Cummings from the get go. > they fail to appreciate that the sentiments it expresses are also hackneyed and trite So are sunsets and love. I appreciate novelty and sophistication as much as the next guy, maybe more. I can even see not thinking these poems are particularly "good" by some set of aesthetic standards and I might even be interested in that kind of criticism. But I also understand that what art is for is bigger than living up to that. To quote Ursula K Le Guin: > I want to revalue the word "art" so that when I come back as I do now to talking about words it is in the context of the great arts of living, of the woman carrying the basket of bread, bearing gifts, goods. Art not as some ejaculative act of ego but as a way, a skillful and powerful way of being in the world. I don't think the Krishnan laundry genocide poem is good poetry, but ... good for what? It was good at getting something out of the author, it was good at speaking to the divide between knowledge of a high profile horror and the work of every day living, and for touching on that feeling among readers. The fact that it doesn't hit my various aesthetic / form markers is orthogonal to that.