The more I have read poetry journals, the more I have despised contemporary "literary" poetry. I think it is because of the following things:
These poems are virtually impossible to parse or "get" anything from without formal education in poetry. They are aimless, unstructured and ambiguous to the extent that most of them are almost total gibberish.
They're almost exclusively written by people with MFAs or PhD's in poetry, which would explain why they seem like they come from a perspective where any combination of words that is comprehensible in a normal way is automatically rejected as trite.
Rhyme and meter are nearly extinct in English poetry right now, and 90% of poems are flat, aimless "free verse" that reads like sad mumbling.
Literary magazines publish material from an array of writers belonging to minority groups, creating an initial whiff of "socially-aware and 'representing' the experiences of oppressed voices," but they are heavily, disproportionately interested in the trauma and suffering-oriented aspects of these voices, consistently selecting extremely raw, triggering, viscerally upsetting writing to represent minority writers.
That last point is the biggest reason I lost my taste for poetry. Partly, it was just the overwhelming focus on human misery in general, but it felt like poems by "minority" writers were especially afflicted.
I don't have numbers gathered together to support this, but it was very noticeable, both in my classes and in my independent reading, that poems about spring, birds, flowers, appreciating beauty, and literally anything innocuous generally were written by white men. Poems by writers of color, as well as poets described as LGBTQ+ in any way, were so frequently focused on abuse, oppression, sexual violence, being called slurs, and trauma that you would easily think only cishet white guys wrote about anything else.
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dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
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