#if you /want/ snobbishness i can give you snobbishness just know you dont[sic] have the reading comprehension for that if this is anything to off[sic]
You THINK I have “no reading comprehension” yet you dump an entire Bible chapter’s worth of text without paragraph breaks. Are you trying to communicate something or just to spew word salad?
You can claim that the haphazard line breaks and total lack of capitalization is “trying to communicate specific ideas of relentless movement through a mundane and indifferent existence” and that the bruise is a plague upon the author’s soul and that the pigeon is the inexorable march of time and whatever the hell else.
You’re snorkeling in a kiddie pool. There is nothing poetic or evocative about Instagram “Poetry”, and its form—a photograph of a book unfortunate enough to be printed with that travesty—betrays that its primary function is to let Instagram users pretend that they read poetry on a physical book for fun.
That word salad was presented as “free form poetry”—technically, in the most pointless way. You’re arguing that any prose is “free form poetry” if you apply enough aesthetic modifications to it. That the Hewlett-Packard logo or Coca-Cola logo is a work of “free form poetry”. That a Homestuck superfan replacing all his B’s with 8’s is writing “free form poetry”.
Notice how my text message recreation (on a separate post here) puts the line breaks back into their natural sentence boundaries? That means that I did not, in fact as you claim, “pick up on it feeling like a series of back to back text messages”. I read it as a badly formatted jumble of words that occasionally resemble a coherent thought, which is betrayed as pseudo-profound nonsense.
It’s like if Deepak Chopra texted his agent while his keyboard was malfunctioning. It’s like a video essay that starts from talking about the “six seven” meme, and then finishes by claiming that downtuning the A note to 432Hz cleanses your chakras and manifests your quantum destiny or whatever. It’s like a paper cup, on which the Starbucks barista misspelled the name “Genevieve” as “Jen Beaver”, taped to the wall of a museum.
There are good ways to make a text “garish and jarring to read”, and presenting it with a format that is supposed to look square, aesthetically pleasing, and Instagrammable is not one of them. The problem with Instagram “Poetry” is that its sole purpose is to look like poetry. Nothing clever is going on with word choice, alliteration or rhymes, meters, metaphors, you name it. No, Instagram “Poetry” just uses haphazardly inserted line breaks. Sometimes an extra wide first-line indentation if you’re lucky.
An artless philistine thinks that poetry is just pretentiously-formatted prose; that’s what Instagram “Poetry” is, and that’s why Instagram “Poetry” is artless, including my own Instagram “Poems” satirizing Instagram “Poems” via the medium of an Instagram “Poem”.
Anyone is entitled to attempt to make art. No one is entitled to have the result praised unconditionally.
