We Have to Make Phones Lame

Dinner parties as nexus of cultural rejuvenation

At the Moulin Rouge by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1892-1895). Not a doomscroller in sight.

We need to make phones lame.

It has to become de rigueur that phone use in the presence of another human being, particularly in public or at a social gathering, is exceedingly uncool.

You can cite a thousand research papers on brain development, throw a billion dollars an hour at educating the youth on digital technology, and have the most well-reasoned arguments against cyborg citizenship possible, but until 24/7 phone use is coded as profoundly uncool everything will stay the same.

“Psh. Did you see Josh at lunch, thinking he’s slick and checking notifications under the table?”

“Yeah, what a phonecel.”

“Total doomscroller. Take him off the invite list for this Saturday.”

This necessity, which I’m doubtlessly not the first to point out, became clear to me after publishing the Substack Poetry Manifesto. The ever-insightful

William Collen

left a great comment, which I’ll excerpt here:

Another challenge will be to disengage the poetry from the platform. You give several reasons why Substack is the prime environment for a new flourishing of the poetic art, and I agree with you; but for poetry to truly flourish it must be seen as something which exists on its own and not just something allied to Substack. As you rightly say, the fundamental unit of poetry is the poem. It is not the book—but neither is it the newsletter. How can poets position their individual works as of first importance, rather than their own blogs and careers, or the platforms which enable them?

I sincerely believe that for the Substack poetry renaissance to be a success, it must develop an independence from the platform and make its presence known in the real world.

This is 100% correct.

Substack is the ideal platform to kickstart poetry, but poetry cannot live solely on your phone, or desktop, or even in a book that you bought off your phone, for that matter. It has to “make its presence known in the real world.”

As I’ve written about a number of times before, poetry is a social activity. This bizarre archetype of The Poet as some isolated, poverty-stricken young man smoking hand rolled cigarettes in a cramped Parisian garret and scribbling sonnets on stained napkins needs to be done away with for good.

Poetry is something that should help knit a community together, it’s not the fancy of social outcasts. Maybe you’re the next William Blake, in which case you should go ahead and rail in the margins. But also, you’re not the next William Blake.

Regardless, such is the existential malaise of today that activities which for millennia were considered perfectly normal human behavior—eating, drinking, singing, and telling stories with other people in the same room—now have to be undertaken with considerable deliberation.

There’s been a lot of talk about the loneliness epidemic. I certainly don’t have to tell you about that.

Am I saying poets should host dinner parties? Why yes, I am.

I encourage everyone to host a dinner party, but poets in particular should become known for providing such a service. And make no mistake, facilitating a pleasant evening for friends and acquaintances is many things, one of which is most definitely a service.

A good meal with friends over a bottle of wine or two, some music, and the reading of a few poems sounds like a perfectly wonderful evening to me. Countless sad souls are craving in-person gatherings but don’t know what to do about it. Why can’t you be the one who sends out some invitations? Or bully the group chat into coming over next Friday? (There are many ways to rally the troops, so to speak.)

From a poet’s perspective, a succesful dinner party would be for everyone to have a great time and maybe get exposed to a little poetry. I say, “a little poetry.” I’m certainly not proposing poetry-themed dinner parties. You want people to come to your dinner parties!

Hosting is an artform in and of itself, but for the poet there is the delicate matter of introducing poetry to your friends in a way that isn’t horribly cringe. One must use one’s best judgement given those assembled. But over the months and years, though perhaps in less time than one might think, it’s not unreasonable to imagine guests bringing or even memorizing their favorite poems to share at a dinner parties. Building a culture, in this case more or less from scratch, takes time and slow, deliberate calibration.

All this to say, poems have little worth when they only exist on a screen or even on the page. This is art as museum display.

Poems need to breathed into life; they’re not just for posting online. Chapbooks, perhaps printed off of Substack, could be handed out. Books borrowed. Phrase stolen. Mercutio quoted. Movies recommended.

If our screens aren’t set aside to make a space for what makes us most human—communing with one another—things will stay the same.

Everything on our screens, from art to media, is so blatantly regurgitated because less and less of what finds its way online originated from the glorious unrecorded human mess which is exemplified by friends hashing things out over dinner.

We have to make phones lame.

We need to make dinner parties cool.