Against taste: why dislike matters in reading poetry

Opening credits: a chirpy, perky, bubble-gum, sugar-rush jingle, the kind of tune that could sell you chips at 2 a.m.

Collapse on the couch. Let the canned drama and cheap thrills wash over you – dopamine quicker than your For You Page, babe.

Can I pull you for a chat?

The very first review I ever wrote was unusually negative for the genre and went unusually viral. The book I reviewed? It went on to meet with shiny reception and enviable sales. Meanwhile, over my freshly hatched ‘career’ as a critic, the heavens split open, cherubs sang, and a neon-pink halo of desirability blazed across the sky.

The vibes were tense. Fans of the book slammed me on social media as an elitist poisoned by academia, or a baby critic with zero experience. At the same time, my inbox filled with messages from colleagues praising the iconic mix of casual audacity and sharp analysis. At literary events strangers approached me with congratulations; work offers stacked up like roses on The Bachelor. A new bombshell had entered the villa, I guess.

What was supposed to be a beginner’s experiment, a little confessional booth rant, sparked the season’s drama. Suddenly, attention, recognition, even my own mini fan/hate club, who saw themselves in me, and loved or hated me for it. Rejecting one type of poetics ballooned into something bigger than a personal aesthetic judgment: a full entry into the game of roles, archetypes and positions that structure the literary villa.

Only, in this reality show, there are no perfectly mixed cocktails and no sculpted bodies in tiny bikinis, no obsession with monogamy or capitalist coupling rituals. Instead, we get drama, alliances and eliminations, carefully staged confessional intimacy, quotable vulnerability and branded personae. Instead of love triangles, contestants fight for jury approval; instead of afterparties, we get panel discussions; instead of a firework finale, awards, residencies and festival invitations.

Cast reveal

Criticism is often imagined as a way of establishing good taste: what is valuable, what should be read, what matters? But my impression, on the contrary, is that it is precisely moments of disgust, rejection and irritation that reveal how the literary field actually works. Taste is always a social currency, a marker of class, education and cultural capital, while bad taste is what slips through, what the system tries to suppress, even as it continuously produces it.

The literary field, like every reality show, is based on a double logic: the audience wants emotional intensity, identification, quick shortcuts to a sense of truth or authenticity, while the jury (critics, institutions, festivals) is expected to maintain the appearance of seriousness, of criteria, of complexity. It is exactly in that gap that the figure of the Saccharine Peddler emerges. The Saccharine Peddler’s verses are saturated with emotion, but without any internal logic, without the structure that might support that emotion. Affect is produced as a self-sufficient gesture, a demonstration of pain, and therefore quickly slides into cliché. Critics who harp on the topic of Instagram poetry are right when they insist that this type of poetry rejects complexity, but that is precisely why it has such a large audience. People want a quick flash of recognition on their feed; they don’t want to unfold metrical schemes. The Saccharine Peddler provides exactly what is demanded: instant identification and the spectacle of emotion. The problem begins when that affective capital starts to reproduce itself endlessly, turning feeling into cliché. The audience cries, but the form remains empty, and the poem fails to produce anything except the mechanical repetition of an emotional trigger.

Next comes The Trend-Setter, who functions as the poetic counterpart to a lifestyle influencer, always in step with the topics backed by grants and covered by the media: body, trauma, gender, identity. These topics are not the problem – they are important – it is their predictable treatment, the way they are turned into styling. When every collection reproduces the same patterns, the result is uniformity, a déjà vu aesthetic that maintains the appearance of contemporariness. This is the bitter logic of poetry itself; the endless possibilities of expression are constantly reduced to formulaic answers, to copy-paste solutions that slide smoothly across the expectations of jury and audience but rarely produce anything that risks a shift. The Trendsetter is therefore proof that the literary field styles itself so as to appear modern, while in fact reproducing a template.

A similar function is performed by The Crowd-Pleaser, who shows another dimension of the same logic. Their poetics offers easily digestible lines, languages and motifs that slip effortlessly into the audience’s horizon of expectations. This is poetry that does not provoke resistance, does not risk failure, does not irritate, and precisely for that reason comes across as playing it safe. Although this could be read as just another rejection of complexity, it also reveals how much the audience longs for a sense of security, and how much the system rewards poetry which meets that expectation. If a dislike of poetry proves its importance, then frustration with the Crowd-Pleaser demonstrates how poetry still provokes desire – however, that desire is channelled through generic products.

In a more extreme form, this dynamic appears in The Over-Sharer. The Over-Sharer turns every feeling into verse, paying no attention to structure, rhythm or economy of expression, convinced that sincerity is enough. This produces texts that drag on, that accumulate unnecessary words, that suffocate what little energy set them in motion. As in a reality show when a contestant doesn’t know when to stop and the producers must cut hours of material to make a two-minute clip, here too the bloatedness suffocates the poem itself. But the poem that collapses reminds us of what it might have been. In that excess lies a trace of virtual perfection that will never be attained, yet keeps drawing the reader back.

Finally, there is The Sloganista. They always step in with a slogan, with an engaged line that sounds like it belongs on a protest banner: clear, loud, politically correct. But by relying on rhetoric, their poems often remain empty, without complexity or inner dynamism. Poetry can never truly reconcile the individual and the collective – it is only condemned to endless attempts – and the Sloganista is content to let the gesture remain just that: a hollow declaration.

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All of these figures – the Saccharine Peddler, the Trend-setter, the Crowd-Pleaser, the Over-Sharer and the Sloganista – do not function primarily as individual poetics, but as symptoms of the literary system. Their appearance is not accidental but tied to the conditions of production and presentation of poetry in Croatia nowadays. If every field has its own ‘rules of the game’, then the literary field in recent years has rewarded precisely these types of performances.

When I sit at book launches and hear authors describe their books as their ‘children,’ or when I see the emphasis placed on covers, PR and design tricks, it is clear that what I am watching is not just individual poetics but an entire system that shapes literature as a cultural product. The air is often thick with romantic declarations about the nature of the poetic text that have little to do with the poems themselves, with moderators using the event for their own self-promotion, and editors presenting books as lifestyle accessories. In such an atmosphere it is hardly surprising that the Saccharine Peddler, the Trendsetter, the Crowd-Pleaser, the Over-Sharer and the Sloganista dominate: they are the mirror of the institutional, market and media conditions in which they arise and are displayed.

It is important to stress: this is not an argument against the audience itself, nor an accusation directed at poets. The urge to write and publish is legitimate and understandable. The problem is not that people want to write, but that editorial and publishing mechanisms push such writing into the marketplace, shape it into brands and reinforce the trends that guarantee their circulation. In other words: this is not about bad poets, but about a system that selects and amplifies particular kinds of poetics because they fit into a wider economy of cultural capital.

This is why dislike is not just a stubborn personal frustration but a committed reading method. Disgust and irritation are not empty sneers or elitist poses; they are alarm bells that remind of the formulas, patterns and tricks that shape the mainstream. When I experience something as pathetic, clichéd or pamphleteering, I don’t just see one writer’s poor taste, but the scaffolding around it: cultural policies that reward predictable themes, festivals hungry for slogans and tearful confessions, a market that polishes the book until it shines like a lifeless designer object.

In that sense, dislike is proof that I still crave something from poetry, and that is not the stiff seriousness of marble busts, but serious unseriousness: glitter that won’t wash off your cheeks, an off-beat TikTok dance, neon flickering like a lamp about to blow. Refusal is the reminder that poetry always holds out a crooked promise of ‘something else’: the scene not yet aired, the twist producers are hoarding, the secret always just around the corner, the shimmer of what could be.

If the opening credits promised the jingle of easy comfort, then the end of the season is a cliffhanger that leaves me restless. Irritation and disgust are what keep me coming back to the sofa, pressing play again, surrendering to the absurd carousel. The reality show of the literary field has no finale – and I, The Side-Eye Killjoy, am still in the confessional, rolling my eyes, chewing on stale popcorn. My dislike will not rewrite the script, it will not crown a new winner, but without it there would be no reason to sit through another episode at all.

Roll credits.