I Went Viral for a Poem I Hated
My weakest work travels the world; my best stays home.
The worst poem I ever wrote has been read by two million people. The best one has been read by nine, and I am related to four of them.
The worst poem took eleven minutes. I know this because I wrote it while waiting for pasta water to boil, and I am the kind of cook who sets a timer for boiling water. It is four lines long. It rhymes, barely, the way a greeting card rhymes when it is not really trying. It compares a person to a coat that never fit, and letting them go to finally giving the coat back. That is the whole poem. That is the entire literary event.
I posted it on a community wall for poets at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, mostly so the eleven minutes would not feel wasted, ate my pasta standing at the counter, and went to bed.
My phone woke me at six in the morning, glowing like a small angry moon.
Numbers do a strange thing when they get big enough: they stop being information and become weather.
Hundreds of shares by breakfast... thousands by lunch. Strangers reading my coat poem in Manila and Manchester and a town in Brazil whose name I have since learned to pronounce. By the weekend it had escaped the wall entirely and was loose on the wider internet, screenshotted, reposted, printed in a curly font over a photograph of, inexplicably, a lighthouse.
You would think I was happy... My mother still thinks I was happy.
Reader, I stood in my kitchen watching the numbers climb and felt the specific horror of a chef watching the whole world declare his instant noodles a masterpiece.
Because here is the thing about the coat poem: it cost me nothing. There is no blood in it. It is smooth and easy and it asks nothing of anyone. Meanwhile, in a folder on my desktop, sat the sequence I had spent a year on: fourteen poems about the winter I moved to a new city and spoke to no one but delivery drivers, poems about loneliness with my actual pulse in them. Combined readership: nine.
The indignities arrived in waves. The poem was reposted with the byline “unknown.” It was attributed to Rumi, a man who died in 1273 and did not, to my knowledge, write about ill-fitting coats. A woman in Florida got the second line tattooed on her forearm, except her tattoo artist wrote “cot” instead of “coat,” and she posted a photo of it, delighted, and I said nothing... because what do you even say.
Someone read it at a divorce party. There is video. Forty people raising champagne to my worst eleven minutes while the DJ waited politely, and the DJ is the only person in that video whose expression I have ever understood.
I know how this sounds. Poets dream of this. I used to read profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and imagine my own arrival: the years of quiet work, the recognition landing at last, for the right poems, in the right order. Instead, recognition showed up drunk, at the wrong house, carrying a lighthouse.
The worst part was that I agreed with my own snobbery. I had once read an essay about why safe poems lose, and I nodded the whole way through it. The coat poem is the safest thing I have ever made. And it did not lose. It lapped everything I believe in, wearing a curly font, standing on a lighthouse. For a long time I treated that as an injustice instead of as information.
Then, in October, a message.
It came through the wall, from a username I did not recognize, a man in his fifties judging by his photo. He apologized for writing to me at all. The people who most deserve an answer always apologize for writing.
His wife was in her fourth month of chemotherapy. He had found the coat poem screenshotted somewhere, byline unknown, and had traced it back to me over two evenings, and he wanted me to know that he had memorized it, and that he said it to himself in the waiting room during every session, all four lines, sometimes twenty times in a row, while the machines did their work behind the doors.
Then he wrote the sentence I have thought about every day since.
“I tried to read your other poems and I could not hold them yet. They are doors. This one is a handle.”
I kept calling it my worst poem because it had cost me nothing to write. It never occurred to me to ask what it cost someone to need it.
A handle.
Four lines, smooth, no splinters, small enough to carry into a waiting room, sturdy enough to hold a grown man's whole weight.
I had judged it exactly backwards.
The qualities I despised in it, the ease, the plainness, the refusal to be difficult, were the qualities doing the work. You cannot cling to a door. In certain rooms, in certain months of a life, a handle is the only literature that fits in a person's hand.
I wrote back. We still write, on and off. His wife finished treatment in the spring, and he sent a photo of the two of them at a lake, squinting into the sun like people who have earned it. I printed it, and it lives in the notebook where the fourteen loneliness poems live, page one, ahead of all of them.
Do I love the coat poem now? No. Let me be honest, this is a story, not a conversion. I still wince at the rhyme. I still think the lighthouse is deranged. When people at readings request it, and they do request it, I perform it with the enthusiasm of a rock band playing the hit they wrote as a joke in 1997.
But I have stopped calling it my worst.
And somewhere along the way it stopped being mine at all, the way a coat you give away stops being yours, which, yes, fine, I hear it too... The poem was right about everything.
The loneliness sequence has about forty readers now. Forty is not two million... Forty is also not nine. One of them wrote me two full pages about poem eleven, the one nobody screenshots, and I have reread her letter more times than I have looked at any number the coat poem ever produced. Doors open slowly. That turns out to be what they are for.
Some nights I still check the numbers, out of an itch I will not dignify with a nobler name. The poem travels while I sleep. It is in classrooms now, apparently, and on at least one mug. Last month a stranger sent me a photo from a hospital corridor in another country: my four lines, taped to a corkboard, byline unknown, hanging between a hand-washing poster and the staff rota.
I stood in my dark kitchen looking at that photo for a long time, the phone glowing in my hands, pasta water coming to a boil behind me, the timer counting down, and for once I did not check the numbers and did not mind the missing byline.
Somewhere it is three in the morning in a waiting room, and a stranger is holding the handle.
That is the whole poem. That was always the entire literary event.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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