Does poetry really have to be vague?
I keep coming across a certain kind of contemporary poem, the sort that moves along by lining up everyday images, keeps its voice deliberately low, and never quite comes out and says what it is getting at. There is often a bus ride, or a map, or a hand falling across a page, and there is usually a feeling hovering nearby, hinted at rather than spelled out. This poetry is typically afraid of form and strictness. A lot of people genuinely like these poems, and I do not doubt that response for a second. Still, I often end up closing the book with a faint sense of confusion because I struggle to see what work they are really putting in.
What seems to be going on, at least to me, is that these poems step away from saying anything that could be pinned down as a claim. They describe scenes, they point at moments, they drift through moods, and yet they stop short of working through an idea or landing on a thought. Language is there to show, not to think with. The poem moves forward, but it does not build towards anything in particular, and by the time it ends, nothing has really shifted.
These poems turn away from strong symbols, from arguments, and from forms that might strain or buckle if pushed too hard. At the same time, they also turn away from risk. When a poem does not really put anything forward, it cannot easily be wrong, clumsy, or naïve. It stays safe. Meaning is handed over to the reader, who is invited to fill in the gaps, which can feel personal and warm, but also means that the poem itself avoids doing much of the heavy work.
This is why they often come across as deeper than they really are. The quiet tone, the careful line breaks, the familiar objects, and the sense of intimacy all signal seriousness, even when there is very little going on beneath the surface. Once that pattern clicks into place, it also becomes clear why this kind of poem is relatively easy to produce. There is no need to hold a tricky idea together across a whole poem, no need to shape a structure that might collapse, and no need to push language until it starts pushing back. A more or less random chain of believable images, lightly tied together, is often enough.
None of this means that these poems should be written off. Some people truly get a lot out of them. They can be comforting, and they are easy to slip into, especially when you do not want to wrestle with anything too heavy. So I’m not at all against people enjoying this sort of poetry.
The trouble starts when this one way of writing is treated not as one option among many, but as ‘the’ option. In workshops, competitions, and the small circles that often end up setting the tone, a narrow idea of what counts as good contemporary poetry tends to take over. Poems that try to think things through more openly, that lean on form, that take on narrative head-on, or that develop intellectually sophisticated arguments, are often brushed aside. They get called overdone, old-fashioned, or too much, while the quiet, image-led poem gets praised for its restraint and ambiguity.
I don’t think that this narrowing is necessarily driven by bad intentions. It perhaps grows out of how these spaces work. A poem that avoids clear statements is hard to knock back without sounding blunt or unfair. It fits neatly into workshop talk, because it can be taught with a loose set of habits and judged with a shared nod of approval. It also lines up well with a wider cultural taste for understatement.
Yet a healthy artistic culture should leave room for more than one lane. Sometimes a poet will want to write something light, fleeting, and surface-level, something that simply catches a moment and lets it drift past. At other times, that same poet may want to take on something knottier, build something denser, or say something that could be pushed back against. What frustrates me, then, is not that these poems exist, but that they are so often treated as the end point.
So my view is not that this kind of poem should disappear. It is that it should sit alongside other kinds of poems without edging them out. Let the poets who are drawn to this mode carry on, and let the readers who love it enjoy it. But turning a preference into a standard, or a mood into a measure of worth, flattens the landscape. The moment we stop expecting poems to sometimes think hard, take risks or present themselves as puzzles that need to be worked out, we end up with a poetry scene that is impoverished as a whole. Diversity in poetry is not just about who gets to write, but about how far we let writing itself stretch.
PS: I wrote a piece about how AI will be able to mimic the human touch in creative writing so well that humans might no longer be needed in the loop. Check it out!