When the Poet Becomes the Product

Perhaps that’s why I find so much contemporary literary advice frustrating. An extraordinary amount of energy is spent teaching writers how to become visible while far less is spent teaching them how to become better. Conversations about platforms, audiences, engagement, personal brands and online presence often seem to overshadow conversations about craft. The assumption appears to be that the greatest challenge facing writers is not writing well but attracting attention. I’m not convinced that’s true.

Of course, visibility matters. Writers need readers, and there is nothing inherently wrong with sharing work, building connections or participating in literary communities. Many writers who were excluded from traditional publishing networks have found audiences through social media and independent platforms. That has undoubtedly been a positive development. My concern is not that writers have become more visible. My concern is what happens when visibility becomes the primary goal.

The language surrounding contemporary writing increasingly borrows from the language of marketing. Writers are encouraged to establish themselves, develop a brand, identify their audience and cultivate a recognisable presence. The work itself can begin to feel strangely secondary. A poem is no longer simply a poem. It becomes content. It becomes evidence of activity. It becomes another contribution to a carefully managed public identity.

The problem with branding is not merely that it encourages self-promotion. The deeper problem is that it encourages consistency. Brands are expected to be recognisable. They succeed by becoming predictable. Good writing often works in precisely the opposite way. It evolves. It changes direction unexpectedly. It contradicts itself. It takes risks. The writer who becomes overly invested in maintaining a public identity may eventually find themselves protecting that identity rather than challenging it.

I sometimes wonder what this does to the creative process itself. Writers have always cared about readers, but there is a difference between wanting to communicate and wanting to be approved of. The first can sharpen a piece of work. The second often weakens it. Once a writer starts asking how a poem will be received before asking whether it is honest, something important has already been lost.

Perhaps this is why so much contemporary literary culture can feel strangely performative. There is often more discussion of being a writer than there is of writing. More discussion of literary careers than literary technique. More attention given to visibility than to language. In some corners of the poetry world, it is entirely possible to spend hours learning how to increase engagement and almost no time at all learning how to strengthen a line.

That imbalance has created a curious ecosystem of self-appointed experts offering advice on audience growth, personal branding and influence. What strikes me is how rarely these conversations touch the actual mechanics of poetry. There are endless discussions about building a platform but relatively few about rhythm, image, syntax, structure or revision. It is as though the difficult work of developing as a writer has been quietly replaced by the easier promise of becoming more visible.

I understand the appeal. Improving a poem is hard. It requires patience, failure, uncertainty and sustained attention. Building an audience at least offers the possibility of measurable progress. Numbers go up. Followers increase. Engagement improves. Yet none of these things necessarily make the work better. A poet can become increasingly successful at attracting attention while remaining exactly the same writer they were five years earlier.

This is where I think many writers become trapped. The attention that once belonged to the work gradually shifts towards the person producing it. The writer becomes the story. The personality becomes the focus. The pressure to remain visible grows. Every opinion, every experience and every new piece of work is absorbed into a public performance of authorship. The danger is not that writers become self-promotional. The danger is that they become self-conscious.

The most liberating moment in a writer’s life may be the moment they stop giving a fuck about approval. Not readers. Not criticism. Approval. The desire to be liked has probably damaged more poems than any lack of technical ability. Good writing often begins when writers stop asking whether people will applaud and start asking whether what they have written is true.

That freedom is difficult to achieve in a culture obsessed with visibility. It requires accepting that not everybody will understand the work. Not everybody will agree with it. Not everybody will like it. Yet poetry has never been strengthened by consensus. The poems that endure are rarely the poems that tried hardest to please.

The question that matters, then, is not how many people know who the poet is. It is whether the poem survives once the performance is over. Whether it remains with a reader. Whether it reveals something previously hidden. Whether it says something worth saying. Everything else feels secondary.