Event Type
Through literature and media, from the rise of Tumblr to the current, trendy Instagram poetic form, and observing through the films of Wes Anderson, A24, Greta Gerwig, and Noah Baumbach to the music of Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Bright Eyes' Connor Oberst, and Lucy Dacus, Millennials have made it chic to be sad, forlorn, and distraught. But there's something deeper going on underneath the surface as many of these queer, gender-questioning artists battle grief, late-stage capitalism, the popularity of social media, and deep religious indoctrination in response to the late 80's Satanic Panic. In their formative years Millennials all over took Sylvia Plath's "Sad Girl" poetry and turned them into mood boards on Pinterest, themes on Tumblr blogs, and tattoo'd lines of suicidal ideation on their bodies ironically. Millennials imagined a world in which sadness was the "in" to artistry, to creation, to being seen as valid and interesting and important. However, 2012 soon turned to 2022, and in recent years, Millennials have had to cope with a pandemic, economic decline, and the general mundanity of life appearing much more dull, no longer seen through those rose-colored Snapchat filters. Our panel seeks to discuss and investigate these trends and how they play into other topics this generation is tackling head on like compulsive heterosexuality, deconstructive, and disability visibility; what they've done for poetry at large through investigation of the Confessional and it's rise in Millennial art; from the Sad Girl turned Mad Girl and it's validity inside and outside of the classroom, the workshop, and the Chapbook contest; and into the rising craze of short, neatly formatted social media poetry from digestible, sometimes ridiculed, poets like Rupi Kaur. What can we learn to do, or not do, from these emergences and changes in subject, form, and delivery? How can we engage in good faith as and with Millennial poets and turn this talent for aestheticization into something productive and constructive?