“Anti-poetry” is already an oxymoron.
Stickers from KROTCH Magazine
If we treat poetry as the product of poetics—as a stable, nameable thing that can be made, sold, and filed under a genre—then it stops being poetic in the way I care about. It becomes a label, a category. The moment you call something “poetry,” you’re no longer just describing it; you’re prescribing how it should be read.
Poetics vs Poetry-as-Label
For me, poetics is descriptive. It looks at what people call poetry, how genres form, how communities share a sense of “this counts” and “this doesn’t.” It’s about observing and describing patterns: forms, tropes, habits, scenes.“Poetry” as a label, on the other hand, is prescriptive. The act of saying “this is a poem” is already a move. It tells the receiver how they’re supposed to approach the text: slowly, seriously, symbolically, with a certain kind of respect or suspicion.
So when I say:
“Poetry cannot be descriptive; it can only be prescriptive,”
I mean: the label “poetry” isn’t neutral. It doesn’t just describe what something is; it tells you how it should be received. That’s a soft kind of control.
When Context Changes Purpose
When elements of a familiar genre are produced in an unfamiliar way, the purpose of the text shifts.Take a simple example: a set of instructions to assemble a chair.
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If you read them at home, alone, the purpose is straightforward:
help you build the chair.
- If you stand on a stage and read the exact same text to an audience, the purpose changes: it might become performance, parody, conceptual art, or just confusion.
Same words. Different language happening.
In the second case, the receiver has to juggle at least two levels at once:
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the original, literal purpose of the instruction manual
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the new purpose created by reading it aloud in a “poetry” or “performance” context
What matters here is the gap between intended purpose and received purpose:
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Intended purpose: what the text was originally designed to do.
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Received purpose: what the receiver believes the text is trying to do now, in this context.
As soon as you bring a text into a new frame, the received purpose can diverge completely from the original intention. That divergence—the receiver actively trying to decide what this thing is supposed to be—is where anti-poetry starts to glow.
When we move from non-fiction (like instructions) to creative works, that gap only gets wider. The more “poetic” the text claims to be, the more interpretive work the receiver has to do to decide what it’s actually doing there.
Intention, Reception, and the Problem with “Poetry”
As producers of texts, we can never know if our audience is receiving the text the way we intended. Once we stamp “poetry” on something, we’re not describing how it works—we’re prescribing how it should be approached.We’re essentially saying:
“Please treat this language as poetic.
Please accept these metaphors, line breaks, and devices as meaningful.”
That’s a way of dictating connotation: asking the receiver in advance to agree that this is special language. If that is the explicit purpose of the text, fine—that’s a choice. But it’s still prescriptive.
The moment we declare a creative work to be “poetry,” we also plug it into a social machine: journals, festivals, foundations, institutions, “the poetry world.” The piece becomes a member of a club with its own expectations and manners. From that point on, we can never objectively say whether it achieved its “true purpose” or not, because that purpose is now tied up with social and institutional expectations.
So Where Does Anti-Poetry Live?
We can approach anti-poetry from two sides:-
On one hand, any text can become poetry if a receiver experiences it that way. A noticeboard, a receipt, a police siren, a supermarket announcement—if the receiver reads it as poetic, then, for that moment, it is. Art is subjective.
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On the other hand, any text branded “poetry” by its producer that fails to do anything for its receiver may be labeled by some as “anti-poetry.” It arrives with the label but doesn’t land with the force. Art is objective. Subjects are “not” “objectively” “intelligent”.
The problem is: we can never objectively measure whether a text “achieved its purpose.” All we ever have is the receiver’s understanding, filtered through three forces that shape their interpretation:
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Content – what’s (apparently) being said
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Format – how it’s arranged or delivered
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Context – where, when, and with whom it appears
If these are prescribed, they belong to a social organisation or genre system (“this is how poetry looks, sounds, behaves”). If they’re purely described, they exist on the periphery of those systems—found in real time, outside of immediate codification.
At its core, this isn’t just a poetry problem; it’s a language problem. We’re always trying to understand language as a cultural artifact while we are already inside it, using it, misusing it.
The Better Question
So maybe the question shouldn’t be:-
“What is poetry?”
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or “What is anti-poetry?”
Those questions pull us back into labels and gatekeeping.
A more useful question for me (and for OBJECT:PARADISE) is:
How can we create contexts where receivers of texts are encouraged to ask themselves those questions—
in the moment, in the room—and come to their own conclusions about what a language happening is, as it happens?
Anti-poetry, in that sense, doesn’t live inside the text at all.
It lives in the moment when someone looks at a ham-reading, or a chair manual on stage, or a “normal” poem, and quietly thinks:
Wait… what is this supposed to be?
If we can get people to live inside that question—together, in a shared space—then we’re on the right track.