The Substack Poetry Manifesto

An incredibly important screed

A man writing something incredibly important. Photo by Kheel Center, Cornell University Library.

Poetry is dead, long live poetry!

Substack provides an opportunity for poetry to return as a major force in culture.

I’ll briefly give a “good enough” definition of Substack, poetry, and culture.

Most people don’t give much thought to Substack or poetry, yet. But you can’t go online without overhearing an unending chatter surrounding this thing called culture.

The culture wars. Culture jamming. Popular culture. Cultural decay. Cultural relativism. Cultural appropriation. Cultural enrichment programs. Blah blah blah blah blah.

There are thousands upon thousands of definitions of culture, many of them useful, most of them not; this is not an academic text, so I’ll give the most bare bones definition of culture I can:

Culture is a way of life and a way of thinking.

OK, great. No further questions, please.

Now poetry. When they hear the word poetry, most people think of professors, or tortuous 50-minute struggle sessions led by high school English teachers, or cringe slam poets. That’s where the “culture” is right now. There are good historical, and dare I say spiritual, reasons why this is currently the case but, again, we’ll leave that to the side for now.

I can’t believe I’m about to define poetry in public (this is truly the realm of madmen), but here we go.

If we substitute “Poetry” for “True Wit” in the following Alexander Pope couplet we have my barest bones definition:

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd;
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Ideas, expressed beautifully.

Poetry has palpable rhythm, and often rhymes, producing a pleasurable body/mind sensation which one cannot so easily produce in mere prose. When you encounter it, you know and feel it. The way that old judge guy said he couldn’t define pornography but he knew it when he saw it (a bit sus, as the kids say).

Your average Tom or Sally, if they experience this at all, typically experiences this through music. Music and poetry are closer than kissing cousins. Again, a discussion for another time.

For instance, when you read the following couplet from Walter Savage Landor

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.

You know you’re in the presence of poetry with a capital P.

Poetry is much, much wider and deeper than this, but this is a “good enough” definition. Poetry used to be king. Through their words poets could establish and legitimize nations. Plato wanted to kick poets (most of them) out of his Republic because they possessed too much of a certain sort of power.

OK.

Now we come to the newcomer on the block, Substack.

To explain, I’ll give the floor to Contrary Research, a “Fellowship” whose stated mission is to bring “thoughtful analysis of the best private technology companies in the world.”

Substack makes it much easier for writers (and as we’ll see, not just writers) to find, build and/or “own” an audience, and get paid through the internet.

Cool.

I’m genuinely delighted about this. Substack is the first online platform that I’ve been excited about as a poet/writer.

Let’s circle back to culture for a moment, specifically digital culture and by proxy (kinda) the internet.

Digital culture, the insertion of computers into every man, woman and child’s pocket and the subsequent and insane instant access to millions upon millions of diverse channels of entertainment and information, has destroyed what some still referred to as “popular culture.”

When I was just entering middle school here in The States (2000), Eminem’s song “The Real Slim Shady” nuclear-power blasted itself into the “popular culture.”

During my 40 minute walk home from school (gasp) me and my friends could hear the song pumping out of every other car that passed as we sang along to the radio. For weeks, my six-year-old neighbor (Nick if you’re reading this, what’s up?) would parade up and down our street chanting the lyrics at full blast with a look of pure elation on his face as his older brother would provide insightful commentary, such as why Slim Shady’s Viagra wasn’t working. My parents didn’t even watch the news but I distinctly remember concerned talking heads on TV bemoaning the plague that was this urine and whiskey mixed drink drinking rapper who was infecting our youth with his vulgarity. I definitely remember the music video (867 Millions views to date, btw).

(“Feminist women love Eminem/Chicka-chicka-chicka, Slim Shady, I’m sick of him.” Sorry, not sorry.)

Today, the closest we come to a “pop culture” mega-star is Taylor Swift. That’s it. And she ain’t 22 anymore.

When was the last time you truly couldn’t escape a song for weeks on end?

On the video front, the once monolithic Disney is now just another streaming service flowing into the collective imaginarium. A robust and inherently uncontrollable digital pluralism has usurped the uniformity of the old electric-age and its tele-visionaries, what Marshal McCluhan termed The Global Village.

In his mind-bending book Human, Forever, James Poulos points out that digital phenomena share many characteristics once reserved for spiritual forces, such as being in two places at once, passing through walls, or inhabiting various household items. He also sees the worst as having already happened. I graduated high school in 2007, the year the first iPhone hit the market.

That year, Poulous says, without realizing it, “we all became cyborgs.”

One of the byproducts of this shift, which has been pointed out again and again, to no real effect, is the rise in distraction, or rather, the a perpetual state of distraction, which makes impossible many worthwhile activities, one of which is reading anything of substance.

Distraction has become a way of life and a way of thinking for many, many people in the broader culture.

For whatever criticisms one can levy at Substack, I don’t see another media platform attempting to address this problem as successfully as they are.

Recently, on Sept. 19, Chris Best, the co-founder and CEO of Substack, published a post titled An algorithm for quality in which he said

Can you imagine how your view of the world might change if you spent your time online in a place optimized for reading what you care most about, rather than just endless scrolling? What would it feel like to check a feed that’s trying to catch you up on what you deeply value rather than keeping you feeling anxious, angry, and alone? 

We intend to find out. 

To be a reader is to be active, whereas the consumer of the new media, social and otherwise, is passive. And unlike the glutton, the doom-scroller doesn’t even need to chew in their act of consumption.

So, we have a culture of distraction coupled with a breakdown of popular.

Is this good or bad? Well, both. Ultimately, it is what it is, as they say.

So where do the poets come in?

From the beginning, poets received their laurels because they could instruct and delight their audience.

They were honored because to do just one of these was difficult. Homer was not just a fancy talker, he had a command of disparate fields of knowledge that encompassed the whole of his civilization.

Obviously we live in a radically different reality than that of Mr. Homer and a poet today couldn’t possibly hope to have a firm command of all fields of knowledge.

Still, poets will regain an esteemed place in culture only so far as they are able to reclaim their role as individuals who delight and instruct.

Instructing is seemingly a more difficult task in an age when the broader narrative consensus has been fractured. Poetry entered the Academy in the 20th century and quickly devolved into, well, an academic enterprise. This has evolved into an increasingly unstable Ponzi scheme of poetry MFAs where academic poets write poems for other academic poets to bolster their credentials within higher education.

The Academy is crumbling and whether it can be bolstered or reconstitute itself remains to be seen. Still, poets can step into the narrative vacuum to write and sing of the goodness, truth, and beauty they experience for their communities.

Delighting and instructing a particular community is a far cry from the 20th century insistence on focusing on “just the text,” or the learned inaccessibility of the Academy, exemplified by such celebrated texts such as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.

Poets should take up this weighty task while realizing that the communities are always gladly and maddeningly porous, overlapping to smaller and greater degrees depending on your analysis. We’re all part of the human family.

In preparing for this manifesto, I had taken some screenshots of academically credentialed poets on Twitter/X comparing notes on how to get published by this or that small press. They were basically just commiserating about how much that sucked. It was honestly so depressing I just don’t have the heart to post them.

But part of the beauty of Substack is poets don’t have to play that game anymore. With some savvy and dedication you and your friends can start your own enterprise and publish your own work exactly as you like.

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Substack Poetry Protocol: A Proposal in Progress

Establishing the right practices and protocols is difficult, and the best protocols are open to change and accept that a certain amount of tailoring is necessary for each individual.

What I am presenting is a first draft; my plan is to update this section periodically, perhaps every six months or so, as I get more feedback from my audience and other poets.

First, to talk about poetry is to talk about poems. Today we often associate poems with books, which is entirely reasonable, but poems throughout history have been transmitted primarily through the spoken word.

The unit of measurement for poetry is the poem, not the book.

Substack gives you all the tools you need to provide an audience with poems in written and oral form. If enough people are delighted by your poems, you can simply put them all into a book and sell it to them. Right? Right.

I’m going to show you the way my subscribers receive my poems and then explain why I do it the way that I do.

Here you go:

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I Have No Lips

Approaching The Cup

I have no lips to trace you with,
Just these words from screen to screen.
That I might glimpse such galaxies in you,
Scan the passages of this great mind
That holds us and all the hope-filled stars 
In His confounding lines, your finite part
Startled by what mine might mean
To one like you, who keeps the old
Ways extant, by cradling the new,
Cleansing fire of our stubborn creed.
I can’t, I might, with half my hours spent, 
Spend the other in your beauty’s tent
In some chosen, lovesick city, a crusade away…
For once, the reckoners were right—
The loving heart must doubly pay.

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That’s it.

I personally don’t even add a subscribe button on my poems, reserving those solely for my non-poem posts.

From the top, the first line is the title of the poem. The second line is the name of the collection (or book) that the poem comes from.

The image is from my friend and colleague

David M Flores

at The Symbolic World who I commissioned to do the illustration for my collection, Approaching The Cup. This illustration appears on every poem I’ve published so far on Silver Door, which lets the reader know these poems are part of a shared project.

Next, is a recording of me reading the poem (I use a Yeti mic which I got for around $90) accompanied by my friend Lance Leeson on guitar.

Then there is the text of the poem.

I’ve also worked out a plan for my collection to be turned into a small batch of handmade books by Sylvan Bookworks sometime in 2024.

There have also been discussions off-screen about creating a practice of embedding PDF files of chapbooks into Substack posts and encouraging subscribers to print them off and share them with friends.

So you’ll notice that I’ve collaborated and am collaborating with a number of people. I understand that cultivating a network of different artists and writers can feel daunting if you’ve never done this before, but as these practices become more common and poetry becomes less and less associated with small traditional printing presses (aka books of poetry run mostly by academic types) I assure you it will become easier. It’s also incredibly rewarding. Art is a social activity or else an indulgence.

I have some background in digital media, I studied it at university, but I am hardly a tech savvy person and I’ve been able to put this together. I’m slowly building up my toolkit. Substack really does make a lot of this easy and I’m grateful for that.

Poets need to embrace a little I AM BATMAN-energy if this is going to work. You’re not just a writer. Challenge yourself to do more across different domains and you’ll be surprised how you can rise to the occasion.

You’re in charge.

The public responds to someone sincerely playing out and owning the role of poet, even if you can barely write, as we see in the multi-millionaire poet Rupi Kaur.

You have to be able to say in your own way, “Hi, I’m a poet and this is what I do.” And then you have to bring the goods.

As I mentioned before, I’ve had discussions with a few other poets behind the scenes about different ways of creating and collaborating on Substack.

One idea we settled on was to have three to five poems from different poets under a single post. One image, tying together a loose theme shared by the poems, and then the texts and accompanying audio.

This could be distributed across different publications or not, as seen fit, as a sort of mini online poetry mag, encouraging the audience to linger for more than a few minutes. This can only work if poets respect their audience’s attention first and foremost, calling them to inhabit a self-contained world of poetry for longer than most anyone typically engages with art online.

The new publicationPulp, Pipe, & Poetryhas done an impressive job of assembling a collective of writers who deliver the goods—fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—and have aspirations to incorporate audio into their work as well as physical media to accompany their online magazine.

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OK, but can this really work?

Yes.

I was talking a friend a fellow poet about this venture and mentioned how, from what I can tell, the most successful poet on Substack is

Andrea Gibson

.

She’s got an orange check mark, which means she has at least a thousand paying subscribers. Her monthly subscription costs $5 per month. So she has at least 1,000 subscribers, and likely a good bit more than.

From her About page, Andrea says that: “I'm a spoken word poet who can't stop quoting my therapist. I travel around the world speaking my poems out loud on stages. I write about love, mental health, and social justice. I am queer and non-binary and write poems about that too.”

Andrea is talented, and has been a public poet for years. She speaks to and for her community.

Actually, I first heard about Andrea some time ago from a surprisingly talented and sweet young lady poet who who went to a nearby small liberal arts college. This student was an environmental sciences major.

I’m an Orthodox Christian and in many ways Andrea and I are radically at odds. Regardless, I think “Things That Don’t Suck” is worth studying. If you look at her about page and posts, she integrates images, audio, and video really effectively.

Andrea isn’t just a poet in the narrow sense most think of that word. She dips into other domains. All of us are obviously capable of doing that and stretching our capabilities.

For instance, I’ve recently dipped my little toe into video.

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Your Mother was a Flower

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Of course, there is no guarantee any of this will work.

I think it most certainly can.

But the public doesn’t want poets to merely “express their true selves” through poetry. They want poets who speak to their community and who consistently show up and provide high-quality work in the digital realm that can translate into the physical world.

There is no reason why there can’t be hundred of poets with the success of Andrea Gibson on this platform in five to ten years (Silver Door will be going paid in 2024).

Substack has a certain kind of cool kid vibe to it which stands in contrast to the cesspools which are the major social media platforms. As Substack grows the vibes will shift, and that’s fine.

If it blooms, great.

If it withers, fine.

Even if winter comes, Poetry is a perrenial flower.

Plant your seeds soon.