Thank You Internet: The Guardian on Rising Popularity of Women Poets

Readers are becoming familiar with the work of more women poets thanks to (a) the internet and (b) the 24-hour news cycle. While times are tough, writes Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, we're turning to poetry for solace (and entertainment) and finding some brilliance in the meantime.

“Hera Lindsay Bird has attracted the biggest hoo-ha with a poetry book I can recall,” wrote one reviewer of the New Zealand-born poet, whose recently released debut collection has become a cult bestseller in her home country. And rightly so: Bird’s frank, outrageous writing – see, for example “Keats is Dead so Fuck Me From Behind” – is in turns bleakly hilarious and peppered with pitch-perfect similes (“the days burn off like leopard print”; “Love like Windows 95”). It has made me, like many others, more excited about poetry than I have been in a long time.

She may be half a world away, but her voice seems to speak to women of my generation regardless of geography. “I love it when people who don’t usually like poetry like my poetry,” she told an interviewer recently. “It’s a mean joke, like tricking someone into joining an improv troupe.” One poem, entitled Monica after the character from the 90s sitcom Friends, has been so popular that the website that published it, The Spinoff, received more hits than it has had in its history.

That her poetry is creating such excitement isn’t just about Bird’s talent and the way she speaks to a younger audience, although those are of course major factors. As Bryan Appleyard noted in a piece for the Sunday Times, the medium is seeing a significant revival of interest that has the potential to reach a level not seen since the Victorian era, and much of it thanks to internet culture and the 24-hour news cycle.

I don’t need to tell you that we are living in strange, interesting, and often horrifying times. Rev Dr Jane Leach’s Radio 4 Thought for the Day last week reflected on how people turn to poetry in times of crisis. Through our screens and news feeds, we increasingly witness acts of violence and horror that defy straight analysis. It’s no wonder that poetry is providing emotional succour where the bleak language of news reports so often fails. And in the process, it is going viral.

Continue at the Guardian.