Poets Watching TV: Alinea and the Poetry Game

Up Your Creative Quotient & Watch the Tube Like an Artist

Welcome to the first installment of Poets Watching TV, a new feature at PopPoetry, a poetry and pop culture Substack written by Caitlin Cowan. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox weekly, subscribe so you won’t miss a post.

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So far, PopPoetry has focused on poets and poems that crop up directly in popular culture, along with considerations of tropes or stereotypes about poetry and poetics (the art and theory of writing poetry). Poets Watching TV is about finding poetry where there doesn’t appear to be any: in shows and videos about food, painting, music, and more.

c/o Zagat

As Grant Achatz says during a menu development meeting at his famed three-Michelin-star Chicago restaurant, Alinea, “Everything is derivative… that’s ok. That’s normal.” I’m not the first person to engage in the imaginative exercise I’m about to describe, but I hope I do it well.

Whether you write poetry, read it, or are just curious about both, I want to share a new way of looking at the world as a creative person, no matter what your preferred creative output is.

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At the heart of Poets Watching TV is something I call the poetry game. More of a thought exercise than a competition, the rules are simple: