When a Poet is a Content Farm

dog person spotted, and soon to be eliminated…

Gentleman was having fun with "you wouldn't think you were ugly" hahaha

really excellent video. huge joel

I guess we're in the "stolen art revealed" era

Thanks for the video Henry, I love it!!!

I'm nervous for you to post this to youtube because as a cat person I fear other cat people will riot. I mean I'm not denying that my cats don't give too much of a shit when I leave. But some will and they will tweet at you and try to ruin your life about it

that one about the sun omg its hilarious but maybe just slightly TOO stupid for eliza grace

Loved the dump truck cameo.

after watching this video and being BAFFLED by just how little work she puts into changing the stolen poetry, i went down a little rabbit hole trying to find information about her. i quickly realized that aliza grace is probably not a real person, as there are no pictures of her or anything else on the internet to confirm her identity. i'm suspecting that someone just realized that this is a quick way to earn money; stealing a bunch of popular quotes and poems, and writing some half assed ones on their own. she, or whoever is behind the accounts and books, seems to just change the poems and quotes enough to make sure that its her work instead of the source material that shows up if you google it, with no regard to the language or rhythm of the poem. so in short, i don't think she's a poet or even someone who wants to be a poet. i think she's quite disinterested in writing and that's why it makes sense for her to steal something only to make it worse.

Ive been seeing these float around on twitter and Im so happy you talked about them. Perfectly expressed my guttural reaction to reading some of the ones I saw

You are so right about the dog being a very important part of that poem. As a cat person, the change from 'dog' to 'cat' made me laugh out loud picturing the judgemental eyes of a cat staring out a window at someone. Also the idea of the cat batting her in the face because she tried to kiss its head on the way out.

While I hate gatekeeping art, the first though that hit my brain unfiltered was 'that isn't a poem'. Those are just vague statements that are neither original nor profound, but boringly trivial. They also have this wanna-be-psychological whiff of self-help which makes me slightly aggressive. Why would anyone wanna steal that?!

Funny to see that one of the quote-to-poems involved slightly rewriting the words, and accidently using the "your" instead of "you're".

I have to say, the plagiarism is abhorrent but I think a cat does work in that context lol. There are plenty of cats that are very openly affectionate. Still atrocious that she ripped off the poem though

a while back i saw a video not about alazia grace, but rupi kaur who has a similar style of writing, and it compares a poem by her to the poem wild geese by mary oliver. it contrasts rupi kaur’s and mary oliver’s use of simple conversational words, idk it just has a similar vibe to this video and if you’re someone turned off of simple plain english poetry by these kinds of poets i would seriously recommend watching it. free verse/plain english poetry doesn’t have to be meaningless https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8pkS2jp/

When big joel posts videos for his patrons i get two push notifications And i think of the times you pushed me away

The random word changes (dog to cat, October to November, et al.) seem indicative of Grace having a middle-school understanding of plagiarism. Like, "I didn't write the same thing, I paraphrased."

I always get flooded with pages of poems/posts like this when my partner and I are in conflict. It feels so insidious

Geez that dog poem was so good. And as a cat person (who also likes dogs!), a dog 100% works better

This video is a pretty good example of the craft involved in poetry. How small changes can just completely ruin decent poetry

I write a lot of free-verse poetry and read a lot of it, too. Allen Ginsberg is one of my favorite poets. So, suffice it to say, I have nothing against free-verse poetry or even just weird poetry. These poems, though, aren't free-verse. Free-verse still requires a sort of rhythm to it. The rhythm might jump around, make no sense, and take a few reads before you consciously know it, but it is there. I'm not trying to gatekeep here; poetry is beautiful, and everyone should try writing or at least reading, but the first thing is just words. These are just sentences that people might vaguely identify with, but the formatting is that of a poem. These should be on stock images of landscapes posted to some hacky Instagram account. It's just strange. Even for a content farm, this is low effort.

I think bad poets should go to jail

Woo poetry vid!! I am a poet & much of my work & teaching focuses on confessional mode. I think that often instapoetry is mistaken as representative of contemporary literary poetry when it’s not. Contemporary literary poetry has much more specificity, attention to form, and rigorous craft. The way you close read these poems around language is really on point. Instapoetry tends to express the “personal” in the most general way possible which lends itself to likes & shares (and if likes & shares are the goal, not art making, who cares if it’s plagiarized…). Very Y/N Imagine post vibes. I find Instapoetry disappointing because there are so many contemporary poets who are doing amazing, interesting, experimental, transformative, etc work! Especially in a confessional mode! I actually wrote about this (briefly) for the Poetry Foundation, and I teach a class on poetry & the personal where we get really in depth on this. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2022/06/poetrys-intimacy As far as plagiarism to worse poem pipeline for gain—makes me think of the woman who plagiarized poet Rachel McKibbens a few years ago and tattooed the lines on her arm 😬