Poetry may be one of the last places where people are still obliged to think slowly.
That thought occurred to me repeatedly while reading submissions for the inaugural 1455 Young Poets Anthology. At a moment when nearly every platform in American life encourages speed, certainty, branding, reaction, and relentless visibility, hundreds of young writers voluntarily chose one of the least efficient forms imaginable: the poem.
This feels culturally significant for reasons that extend beyond literature itself.
Every few months I find myself in a conversation — at a panel, on my podcast, in a classroom, at a dinner table — where someone inevitably declares that young people no longer read. Poetry? Forget it. We’ve all heard the diatribes: attention spans are imploding. Phones have replaced books. Language has mutated into content and clickbait. Artificial intelligence is already disrupting not only the job market, but our historical notions of creativity. Younger generations, we’re told, are both the consumers and drivers of this new normal, communicating through memes, texts, and digital conversations that are at once ubiquitous and impersonal.
The Humanities are under assault, arts funding has disappeared, and literature, needless to say, is dying a slow, ignoble death.
Just don’t tell that to the hundreds of young people who just sent us poems.
And not because poetry offers money, status, or cultural leverage. Not because literary culture suddenly became commercially dominant again. They submitted poems because they were trying to make sense of being alive.
They do not, in short, share older generations’ default setting of scapegoating and disenchantment. Indeed, one of the most surprising aspects of assembling this anthology was not simply the quality of the submissions, but the seriousness of purpose. These writers do not treat poetry as quaint or retro; they are using poems the same ways our best practitioners, spanning cultures and centuries, always have: as a means of thinking, feeling, grieving, questioning, surviving.
The young writers who submitted work to the anthology have no illusions about the world they inhabit. Their poems address loneliness, violence, fractured families, climate anxiety, political exhaustion, spirituality, grief, identity, and the peculiar psychic fatigue of growing up online. They understand what it means to live in a culture of permanent visibility, where all experiences seem curated, and every emotion might become appropriated as content.
While bearing witness and sharing truth, these poems all resisted the one thing that plagues not only the arts, but our global culture: cynicism.
This struck me because contemporary digital culture increasingly rewards the opposite of what poetry demands. Algorithms favor speed, certainty, outrage, branding, and emotional exaggeration. Poetry requires patience. Poetry’s magic, particularly in 2026, is its ability to work its charms quickly (often in one page or less), while slowing overstimulated synapses down, if even for a moment. Poetry is comfortable with ambiguity, invites contemplation instead of reaction, and disorients by describing familiar things in fresh ways. Poetry is meant to be accessible but not necessarily comfortable; it is the antithesis of the non-language favored by brands, it scratches itches not solved by slogans.
That may be one reason younger writers continue turning toward it despite endless predictions about literature’s irrelevance. Every platform in contemporary life pressures people to become more visible, more legible, more marketable versions of themselves. Under those conditions, the act of writing a poem becomes oddly radical. A poem does not need to optimize itself for engagement, nor does it pander by pretending certainty. Poems offer an antidote to the stale and divisive thinking that poisons or politics.
In an age of clicks and tokens and optimization, poetry is refreshingly human.
Many of the strongest submissions felt less interested in performance than in witness. Again and again, I encountered poems searching for forms capable of holding contradiction without collapsing into cynicism or simplification. These writers articulate loneliness without succumbing to despair and acknowledge fear not as hopelessness or surrender.
These poets, like their compatriots collected in old school anthologies, understand irony. Even before they can define it, they see it reflected on TV, in advertisements, in classrooms. The younger generations observe the many ways adults use irony as a shield, as a crutch, as a way to avoid grappling with the urgencies of our times. These poets have the audacity to transcend irony and do the most radical thing imaginable: feel empathy—for their families, their friends, and especially the anonymous human beings around the world who are not described so much as rendered statistics.
That matters in a culture increasingly allergic to stillness.
The problem facing younger generations is not simply distraction. It is fragmentation. Every system surrounding them encourages acceleration—faster opinions, faster identities, faster outrage, faster consumption. Human beings are increasingly asked to process overwhelming amounts of information while remaining perpetually visible to one another. Under those conditions, interior life itself begins to erode.
We should be concerned about what AI and algorithms will do to us, but we must not deny what we’re doing to ourselves.
Perhaps this is why poetry survives every prediction of its death. Human beings continue needing language that reaches beyond information. We continue searching for forms capable of expressing ambiguity, tenderness, grief, and uncertainty without reducing them into data points or content strategies. We continue needing spaces where complexity remains intact. We need a form that both allows and encourages us to make peace with uncertainty.
Young people understand this instinctively. The poets in this anthology are not preserving poetry out of nostalgia. They are using it because they still need it, reminding us in turn that we need it, too.
And maybe the more important question is not why young people still write poetry, but why so many adults stopped believing it mattered in the first place.
