Day 27: Poemfic
Sometimes known as fan poetry, poemfic is when a fan writer creates a poem as an act of fannish expression. The poem can be about the canon, another fannish work, or about the way that fandom itself makes the poet feel.
Conventions
The format must be poetry, and that is the only expectation that the audience has. Much like prose, poems can cover any genre, all tropes, and very wildly in tone and length.
History
The oldest work of fannish poetry that I was able to find comes from, as I am sure will shock no one, the Tolkien fandom. I was not able to find the poem in question, only reference to it's 1969 publication in this Tolkien fan work literature review from The New England Tolkien Society.
From there, the recorded history of fan's writing poems is a maelstrom of works. Where the fic writers and artists go, so do the poets, and they bring their pretty words with them.
In all frankness, the history of the fannish poetry convention is less interesting than the history of the rules various fandom publication outlets have made to police it's distribution. This will be briefly touched upon in the feedback section of this post, but deserves to be a write-up all of its own.
Citrus Tasting Notes
Orange: What a lovely haiku that Sokka could have used in that episode.
Lime: I see we took "Shakespeare is full of dick jokes" to be a call to action.
Lemon: Okay, so there is latin poem, and the opening line is roughly translated as "I'll fuck you in the ass and face-fuck you…" Are you taking notes?
Grapefruit: Not only were you taking notes, but the student has surpassed the master.
Stats
At the time of this post's drafting, there are 80,144 Works in the "Poetry" tag on Ao3.
The top additional tags associated with this tag (after disqualifying synonymous tags) are:
Angst - 10,178 works
Bad Poetry - 6,228 works
Prose Poem - 5,471 works
Fluff - 5,226 works
Love Poems - 5,154 works
Today, the top six (one added to compensate for the presence of the 'no fandom' tag) fandoms in the tag are:
Original Work - 19,966 works
No Fandom - 3,813 works
Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling - 3,243 works
Supernatural (TV 2005) - 2,133 works
原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game) - 1,448 works
Good Omens (TV) - 1,082 works
Reader Feedback on the Medium
Criticism
Most critics of peomfic are not fans of poetry in general. Others think that the subject matter that their fan poets cover is often too repetitive. As one zine editor put it a few decades ago:
"If I read one more poem mooning over that damn Vulcan, I'll set fire to the entire zine!"
- Horizon Newsletter, Issue 22
…People just love Spock, okay?
Others still don't think it counts as real fan work, and that it has no place in fandom even if it is well written.
From Laura Hale in 2002—speaking as a moderator for FanDomination.Net—I managed to find what was probably the most scathing detraction of any specific prompt thus far. It is genuinely impressive in it's entirety, so I have left it in said entirety below:
We're not allowing poetry for three reasons mainly that we discussed early on when we were first developing the site... The first is that most fan fiction type poetry is so vague that it could apply to anything from Sailor Moon to Josh Lyman to Lance Bance to Harry Potter to Serena Williams. When a poem is that vague, and a lot of fan fiction type poetry is, it becomes almost original poetry. FanDomination.Net isn't hosting original fiction or original poetry. Stuff that vague, I can't figure out how to argue that it is fan fiction. It would be like well to me arguing that Allstar by Smashmouth is a piece of fan fiction for Sailor Moon, Harry Potter, Star Trek Voyager, etc. It really isn't though you could make it fit if you wanted too... The second reason is that a lot of fan fiction poetry, no offense intended, sucks and sucks badly. I'd guess that 90% falls into this category. Poetry is hard to write, and harder to write well. The crap to quality ratio is just so high... that coupled with the vagueness factor, it just makes sense to not have it. The last factor deals with content managers... and constructive feedback. When content management goes up, content managers would have had to review poetry and doing that with any degree of consistency would be extremely difficult. Sometimes, poetry in your gut you can just know it is wrong, bad, evil, horrid. Explaining WHY in a constructive format and saying what is good is difficult because unlike prose, each style of poetry has its own set of rules. Those rules are subject to change and a great many of the authors writing poetry aren't aware of the rules, aren't aware of the ones they are breaking, aren't doing it deliberarely as a style thing. You can't just say "This doesn't rhyme" to explain why a poem doesn't work. It's a lot more to deal with than that... and well, giving constructive feedback on poetry as a result of this is darned near impossible. It just isn't fair to ask content managers to do that. It isn't fair to authors because they couldn't get constructive feedback on it... and the disputes would have been many. I've been on a mailing list or two where the list went on self destruct over the issue of poetry with two rigid camps... and I just want to avoid that. Prose is different in that there are generally rules, etc. Giving constructive feedback that is useful and helpful is easier, and more useful.
I think Laura has all bases of criticism covered. My work was done long before I began. Thank you for that, Laura.
Praise
The thing is, though, Laura did such a thorough job above that I found no other quote sufficient to cover the opposite side so thoroughly as she made her point. Thus, the praise shall be in my own words, as brief as I can make them.
To praise fannish poetry is to praise poetry itself as a medium, something that I personally believe we could all have a bit more of in our lives.
Poets comfort, and then confront. They break all the rules that the writers of prose rely upon, and do so with an elegance I can only be but amazed at. That is when they are not inventing and employing rule-sets that would drive a novelist mad—navigating meter and rhyme with fingers that jump and skip like dancers over the keyboard.
In what the longfic writer takes five hundred thousand words to do, the fannish poet sees the path to the same emotion in a single stanza. They synthesize feeling, drip feed philosophy, and cut right to the heart of the matter with a sharpened steel pen-nib.
I am not a poet by trade. But I believe in their beliefs, and I for one think Laura was very, very wrong.
