Last month, the New York Times ran an interesting piece by Alexandra Alter with the heavily alliterative and assonantal title “Web Poets’ Society: New Breed Succeeds in Taking Verse Viral.” Alter describes how Instagram and Tumblr poets with thousands of followers are becoming “best-selling celebrity poet[s].” The article begins with a profile of Tyler Knott Gregson, whose first book “has more than 120,000 copies in print” and whose new book All the Words Are Yours: Haiku on Love had a first run of 100,000 copies (those figures are not typos):
On a recent Friday night, Tyler Knott Gregson, a blond, tattooed poet from Montana, took the stage at a Manhattan bookstore and beamed at the crowd that had come to celebrate his new haiku collection.
“This is rad. I appreciate it,” he said, taking in the roughly 150 people who had crowded into Barnes & Noble. The response from the mostly young, mostly female audience amounted to a collective swoon.
I read ten or so haiku from All the Words Are Yours, using the “Look inside” function on Amazon.com, and the pieces are on par with the one the NY Times quotes via screenshot: “We stumble headfirst / into another season. / The leaves watch us fall.”
I think the great bpNichol (1944-88) can offer some insight on this “new generation of best-selling poets.” This haiku-like piece is from his 1970 collection of concrete poetry Still Water:
