Who’s Afraid of Referencing Pop Culture in Poetry? https://ift.tt/ZPqGYdV
Back in 2017, Melanie Robinson and I ran a workshop titled “Contemporary Confessional Poetry” at the Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio. We shared poems by Lauren Milici and Hanif Abduraqib, amongst others. Some students were excited to reference in their poems; others were hesitant, sharing that they never write about pop culture in their poems.
Look, I get it. There is a fear that these references will date our poems or make our work less relatable.
In the first few years I wrote poetry, I tried my best to strip my poems of any pop culture references out of a desire to create “timeless art.” Now, looking back at these poems I wrote, I realize that firstly, they were totally inspired by a variety of pop culture influences that went unnamed, and secondly, they were devoid of any knowable feeling.
During one of our many conversations about poetry, my father, who is also a poet, told me, “The universal is in the particulars.” It took me a few years to become comfortable referencing pop culture in my poems, but after I did, I realized that I didn’t want to go back. How could I write about my teenage years without my love for Anna Karina’s bangs?
As a 1994 millennial who spent their teenage years on Tumblr and in the stacks of DVDs, my brain works in pop culture references. My poetry was born on Tumblr, first published in a zine created by Lora Mathis, who was the voice of Tumblr at the time. If you were online at that time, you may remember her photos with the phrase, “radical softness as a weapon,” spelled out in alphabet beads, surrounded by pearls and knives. This zine featured artists like Molly Soda, a Latina artist whose work explores online personas and aesthetics. You cannot divorce Molly Soda’s art from her online context, and that’s what I love about her art. These are the artists I was most inspired by in my early poetry years.
In my MFA program, I was figuring out what my voice was. I found myself noticing the gap between poets who reference and poets who don’t. It wasn’t until I read Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and listened to several of her interviews that this tension was articulated to me. I still find myself returning to this part of Parker’s interview on Between the Covers:
“People are always saying, ‘Are you afraid that your work will be dated?’ or ‘It’s too much in this time, you need to remove any time stamps.’ But you know, you need three books to read ‘The Waste Land,’ to figure out the context of what [T.S.] Eliot was talking about. And now we have Google, and think that people will be fine, you know? So I think we forget that that’s just the way poetry is. There are always references to the world that the poet is living in. If there isn’t, it’s probably a boring poem.”
I view pop culture references in poems like gateways into the world of the poet. If I don’t know the reference, I’ll look it up and fall into a Wikipedia hole. Morgan Parker is right. We live in a time where learning about a reference is at its easiest. I live and die by the words of Lady Gaga, I’m not afraid to reference or not reference in my poems.
While writing the past is a jean jacket, I wrote poems as if they were teenage bedrooms, full of music posters and tchotchkes, especially because most poems in this collection explore adolescence, family, nostalgia, and Mexican-American culture. It was important to me to include the soundtrack in my poems because it helps set the scene in a particular moment in time. So much of my adolescent depression was due to feeling like an outsider, and my method of escape was through movies and music. How could I not go into the particular references?
At the end of my poetry pop culture workshop, everyone shared their pieces. One participant, a woman in my MFA program at the time, shared at the beginning of class that she never uses any pop culture references in her poetry. At the end of class, she wrote a poem about womanhood and Hugh Hefner, who had recently passed away at the time, that blew me away.
If referencing pop culture doesn’t feel true to your poetic voice, I still challenge everyone to reference or reflect on a person or piece of art in a poem. Just like writing a sonnet or pantoum can jolt you out of your typical poetic voice, the same is true of engaging pop culture in a poem. Write about your love of skateboarding videos or Charli XCX. Please, I’m dying to read it.
0 Commentaires