Abolishing Poetry: Toward a Poetics of Fracture

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Poetry, as taught, archived, published, anthologized — is dead.

It did not die from disuse, but from excessive care.
From being trimmed, praised, dissected, and taught as a technique.
From being confined to classrooms, analyzed for metaphor density, and reduced to an ornament of language.

What is called poetry today is a mausoleum of rhythm.
A taxidermy of emotion.
A cadence in a cage.

But poetry was never meant to be written.
Poetry was never meant to be “about” something.

It is not a genre.
It is not a style.
It is not the sublime.
It is rupture.

True poetry resists fluency.
It is a cut in language that bleeds presence.
It is the moment where speech fails, and that failure rings true.

The poetic is not what follows rules.
It is what shatters them — in silence, in excess, in dissonance.
It is not the haiku. It is the pause between syllables.
It is not the metaphor. It is what cannot be captured.

You know it when it leaves you wordless.

What institutions call poetry is a bureaucratized ghost.
It mimics the shape, not the force.
It comforts. It flatters. It performs grief and elegance.
But it doesn’t burn.

The poetics that matter now are not to be printed in journals.
They are to be lived through rupture. Through radical presence.
Through fragmentation that is not aesthetic — but necessary.

A poetics that does not describe.
But destroys.

A poetics that makes you impossible to categorize.
That breaks grammar like it breaks surveillance.
That speaks only when silence would betray the real.

If your words fit in a genre,
you haven’t yet touched the vein.