A return to writing
An ex-viral internet poet attempts to rebrand
What is cringe?
I’ve thought about this a lot throughout my life. I think my entire adolescence (which apparently lasts until age 27, if we are talking about executive function development) has been defined by cringe. In middle school, I was so socially unaware that I didn’t realize my “best friend” only was nice to me because she felt bad for me. In high school, I would draw fake wounds on myself on April Fools and try to convince my friends they were real. (??? i know…) And, during my first and second years of college, I was a slam poet.
I was seventeen years old when I arrived on campus, wide-eyed with wonder at being in an academic environment where people casually tossed around words like “hegemony” and “the Panopticon.” I learned how to put words to feelings I’d had for most of my life (microaggressions, misogyny, fetishization). It felt thrilling. I didn’t have to argue about my beliefs anymore. I was safely in an echo chamber for the first time in my life. “Echo chamber” is a derogatory term, but I think it’s actually ambivalent, if you come from a place where your every conviction is treated as annoying or irrational. I found it to be a very nice, comforting, warm bath. (At least politically. This was also the time where I learned to erase my Midwestern accent, discovered that some clothes and music were cool and some weren’t, tried to appear wealthier and more mysterious than I was, learned how to pronounce “Foucault”, etc.)
It was this classic teen blend of god-like confidence and horrible insecurity that launched me into my slam poetry career. This was 2011, the era where slam/spoken word poets would compete at dive bars, would have moderately successful careers or side gigs traveling the country and performing at colleges like mine, but pre-viral videos (or for that matter, instagram poets). The scene revolved around CUPSI, the college nationals competition. I found out at my college slam that I was good at it. I liked expressing things and yelling things passionately.
What makes a lot of competitive poetry “cringe” is that—perhaps this is the defining feature of cringe—it’s fake on some level. Trying too hard. Slam is all about trying very hard, and appearing to try very hard. I remember my coach telling me that “the more pain you appear to be in, the higher your score will be.” In hindsight, my teenage teammates and I were dragging ourselves through trauma—often even manufacturing it, or workshopping it to death where it was so sterile I couldn’t even feel what I wrote anymore—just to have drunk 30+ adults give us high ratings at the bars we’d perform at because they felt bad for us.
I’m not saying there wasn’t writing skill involved, but it eventually felt like the type of writing skill you use to make commercials. Selling your supposed life story as a product. I had lots of material to mine—and I was encouraged to mine it.
I don’t think it got truly exploitative until my poem “To JK Rowling, From Cho Chang” (my cortisol SPIKES as I write out that title lmao). It did very well at CUPSI, and my coach and teammate were starting a project called Button Poetry that was going to upload promising poems in hopes of getting views and money and exposure.
My poem was uploaded, it blew up, and I quickly realized from internet reactions that I was very, very ignorant. That’s okay—I was 17 or 18 when I wrote the poem. The worst thing is that I didn’t even care that much about it, I wrote it because I knew it would do well. We had to draw prompts out of a hat, and mine were “humor” and “persona.” I proceeded to write the poem, thought it was pretty silly and not very nuanced, but my (non-Asian) team loved it and encouraged me to perform it.
The message is something I ultimately must stand behind, in that I am glad that it helped young Asian people find words for their experiences, and perhaps contributed the conversation that now has culminated in films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Crazy Rich Asians, etc., but I wish it hadn’t been uploaded online. I actually asked (begged!) Button Poetry to remove it, probably a day or two after they posted it, and they refused. That’s where it got exploitative—they needed my poem to launch the success of their channel. I quit slam in 2013, for that and other reasons, at the seasoned age of 18. (When I finally decided I wanted it removed a few years later, I got a very nonchalant, “oh, that’s fine, sure”—their channel was doing quite well by that point and they no longer needed to exploit me 😌)
It’s ten years later, and a poem I performed as a teenager will perhaps forever be the top result when anyone googles my name. So it’s with this spirit that I start this substack, to unfreeze my teenage self in time, perhaps futilely, and share/perfect new writing.
Thx for reading, if you are!