The Spotifying of poetry

In recent conversations with a friend (Hi Mat!), the Spotifying of poetry came up. By this term, I don’t mean that poetry is necessarily moving to Spotify, though its presence is certainly growing there. Instead, I’m referring to changes that are taking place in how we consume both music and poetry.

The emergence of Spotify seems to have encouraged people to listen to hit after hit, each from a different group or singer. And in a similar way, social media appears to have enabled us to scroll straight from one individual poem to another. Bearing in mind that most of us are listeners as well as readers, has the shift in how we consume music also played an additional role in altering how we approach poetry?

However, there’s still a trenchant percentage of people who prefer albums, for the way tracks bounce off each other, for the layered, more accumulative listening that helps us appreciate artists more. And then we've got the álbum tracks, which we often end up treasuring more than the hit singles themselves.

And along similar lines, single-poet full collections still have a niche. I believe there’s such a thing as a collection poem, for instance, rather than a magazine poem. A collection poem might be slight if offered up on its own, but it complements the bigger poems around it when placed in the context of an ms, establishing dialogues and connections that run through a book and provide the whole with greater depth.

In fact, I have to admit that I’m starting to wince when I see poets and readers stating on social media that a poem is a banger. Banger after banger can get extremely tedious and mind-numbing after a while. As can hit after hit on Spotify…