Mixtapes Will Save Poetry

A key to making poetry relevant today is to make sharing it intensely personal

Photo by Edgar on Unsplash

I want to write something in response to a group text I was in with a couple of friends. I had just registered for the Frost Farm Poetry Conference in August and told them how excited I am about the possibility of doing the Meter and Form workshop with Rhina Espalier, who is one of my favorite poets and translators. I also heard that A. M. Juster, whom I also admire, is going to be there, too. He even welcomed me to Twitter after I recently re-opened an account. (Note: I have since changed my Twitter handle to @Zina_GomezLiss)

I hardly told anyone I was on Twitter! I was so excited.

Then I went on about my two favorite living poets, A.E. Stallings and Dana Gioia, who both have fairly new poetry collections out: This Afterlife and Meet Me at the Lighthouse, respectively.

After this my friend asked me,

Curious. Why are they your favorites? What is it about them that speaks to you (asking because I don’t have a favorite but would like to find some that inspire me. I feel like there is poetry everywhere once you are aware of it but it’s hard to find the exact poetry that speaks to me.

I would love to answer her by breaking up her text into parts:

• Why are [Rhina Espaillat, A.M. Juster, A.E. Stallings, and Dana Gioia] your favorites? What is it about them that speaks to you?

• I am asking because I don’t have a favorite, but I would like to find some that inspire me. I feel like there is poetry everywhere once you are aware of it, but it’s hard to find the exact poetry that speaks to me.

But before I answer anything let me tell you about Lovestruck Teenage Zina…

It was the 90’s. A heady time for sure, coming off of those big-haired Material Girlish 80’s when we Flashdanced in our dreams like Solid Gold dancers. I was in high school and developing my identity via fashion and music—while also falling madly in love. Unrequited love.

Oh, no.

And it was a time when these contraptions existed…

Back in the day, people used to make mixed tapes (also spelled mixtapes) which were these not-at-all-legal recordings of music off the radio and other cassettes. Making a tape was an act of love and vulnerability because in creating it you were sharing your very favorite songs, hoping that whoever was playing the tape on the other end would love those songs as much as you did.

You may be thinking, Wait… Zina, you made a mixtape for a guy who didn’t love you?!

No! I was not stupid. Young, yes. Impetuous, yes. But stupid?

Well, okay. Maybe a little. But I didn’t make any boy a mixtape.

What I did was fall in love with a boy who was so smart he was headed to this summer camp for gifted high schoolers—one where you had to be in the top three of your class to be considered for a spot. Never in my life had I been so incentivized to get my grade point average up! Anyway, I got into the summer camp. He didn’t like me—hence the unrequited love—but being a girl who liked smart boys I realized that I was at a camp where the smartest high school boys in the state were spending the summer. I found another boy.

But even better, I made smart girl friends. And one smart girl—I will name her Holly after the poisonous berry—was the bestest, coolest girl. She had blue hair, lived in Cambridge, and she made me the best mixtape ever. I won’t tell you what the songs or artists were. Some things are best left mysterious and unsaid. But I will tell you that Holly’s tape expanded my thinking, and those song lyrics became a common language between us and influenced my vocabulary for the rest of my life.

Why are Gen Xers so nostalgic about mixtapes? What makes them so special? Mixtapes are an act of personal curation. We got to be our own tastemakers, editors, and gods of our own small musical universes. And then we got to share the music that we loved, thereby enhancing our relationships with those who received those tapes. Sharing music allowed us to influence and shape each other.

So what do mixtapes have to do with poetry?

Sharing poetry allows us to influence and shape each other as well. So why doesn’t poetry have more of an influence on our daily lives? Our culture?

In 1991. Dana Gioia (that name again) wrote a controversial essay called Can Poetry Matter? It begins:

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

Poetry had become irrelevant because it wasn’t out in the world with the class of people who used to enjoy it. More than 30 years later we are still talking about the state of poetry in less than rosy terms. Take this First Things article by

Micah Mattix

, The Integrity of Poetry, where he writes,

So where are we today, thirty years after Can Poetry Matter? We are still awash in mediocre verse. The only difference is that now people are reading it. Poets still write flat, fragmented verse to demonstrate they’ve learned the rules of the game and can now teach others those rules. Gioia rightly observed that this is ­poetry-as-a-means-to-an-end. But the ready-made and sloganeering work of the Instapoets is also poetry-as-a-means-to-an-end, though sometimes a more lucrative one.

Ouch. So basically poetry is alive and well, but a lot of what we see isn’t good enough to be influential.

Poetry is everywhere and there is so much of it.

How do you find and support a masterfully crafted poem that could influence the world? You need to have it influence a single individual. Many single individuals.

This goes back to one of my friend’s comments:

I feel like there is poetry everywhere once you are aware of it, but it’s hard to find the exact poetry that speaks to me.

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media have created effective vehicles for getting poetry out. This is how Instapoets like Rupi Kaur rise to fame. We have live broadcasts of poetry, like the ones done by Poets.org on their YouTube channel. And there is NPR’s poetry presence here.

There are podcasts. Many podcasts. Here’s the one The New Yorker puts out.

And on Substack you have

The Daily Poem Podcast

And perhaps the closest thing you can come to a Substack mixtape for poetry is

Poetic Outlaws

.

You can receive daily emails of poems from places like The Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and journals like The Rattle (and many others).

What do all of these have in common? They regularly send you poetry. That’s great right? Yes.

But…

None of these places personally know who you are.

What you like.

What you believe.

What you are going through at the moment.

The very well-meaning people on the other side of the interwebs have less of an influence on you because they don’t know you.

However, if you go to someone you know, someone who cares about you, they will try to give you something you need. If you ask a friend for a poem chances are they are going to think carefully about what they send you. Make friends with people who absolutely love poetry. They probably have a breadth of knowledge and will know a variety of poems that will speak to you in your stage of life right now.

Why are Espaillat, Juster, Stallings, and Gioia my favorites?

The four favorite poets I mentioned to my friend—Stallings, Gioia, Espaillat, and Juster—are known as formalists, although I don’t think any of them likes to be pigeonholed as such. I love those poets because they make form look so easy, and they are also witty. They are not my only favorites though. I love Jane Kenyon, Ada Limon, Kay Ryan,

Sherman Alexie

and Mary Oliver as well.

But to make a point, I will tell you how I found A.E. Stallings. It was through Melanie Bettinelli, an IRL friend, who writes the blog The Wine-Dark Sea. Melanie is to my taste in poetry as Holly was to my sensibilities in music. Basically, I read whatever Melanie sends my way. The poetry we share with each other has become a common language between us. And it has allowed me to look at poetry—and the world—in a more generous and expansive manner.

Find your Holly. Find your Melanie. In order for poetry to survive, especially in an age of AI where beautiful sounding verse can be created by something with absolutely no soul, we need to make sharing excellent poetry an act of personal curation.

Who wants me to make them a mixtape?