An Instagram Poet With Hints of Interesting Darkness

New York Times

a day ago

A REBELLION OF CARE: Poems and Essays, by David Gate
Last spring I became fascinated by a David Gate poem called 'Like Every Selfie.' As I was reading it I kept hearing music, at least in my mind. Pretty soon I realized I was hearing the sound of early Talking Heads, particularly the perky/menacing lyrics of songs like 'Don't Worry About the Government' and 'The Big Country.' Suddenly it was easy for me to imagine David Byrne shouting and jerkily dancing his way through 'Like Every Selfie,' with its exhortations to appreciate your friends while they are still here — 'Praise their haircuts' and 'Love their tattoos,' etc. This is how the poem ends:
Don't wait for the eulogiesTo speak out loudThat your friends are preciousAnd they make you feel proud
Yes to friendship: I suspect we all agree with that sentiment. As Byrne once put it, 'My friends are important.'
But was I reading 'Like Every Selfie' the right way? By absorbing it as if it were a lost Talking Heads track, I began to wonder whether I was granting 'Like Every Selfie' extra layers — layers of ironic detachment, social critique, strangeness and humor — that the poem itself could not pretend to contain. This experience happened again and again as I plunged into 'A Rebellion of Care,' Gate's debut collection of poems and essays. I had questions of context, questions of tone. I kept asking, 'How are we supposed to interact with this?'
I should cut to the chase here and point out that Gate is an Instagram poet. He is part of a movement of verse-posters who have achieved fame on social media — in part because they don't write like the poets of the literary and academic establishment. Radical simplicity and therapeutic bromides are the coin of the realm among the Instagram poets, which means that they — like Rod McKuen, the Yung Pueblo of the 1970s — are easy to make fun of.
In 'A Rebellion of Care,' a compendium of his hits, Gate's poems make statements that you can't imagine disagreeing with. The title of the poem usually tells you what's about to go down, as in 'Stay Weird' ('Make your corner of this planet/as weird as you want to'), and 'Flower Power' ('What a world it is that insists/a man, such as I am, can never/appreciate a marigold'), and 'Friendship Will Save Us' ('Friendship is what will save us/so fall deeply in love with your friends'). Sometimes the poems come across like Influencer Beatitudes, sagely guiding us on how to live out loud … on social media. 'Never stop spamming the timeline,' Gate writes, 'with all the things that you love/if you live in a beautiful place/show me.'
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