There is something self-assuredly confident about picking poetry as your artistic muse in today’s online climate, crippled – at least according to American singer Ethel Cain’s viral blogpost – by an irony epidemic. Poetry has become an apathetic and regressive artform, primarily evoked as an engine of go-viral-quick ridicule like in the cases of Rupi Kaur, Gabbi Hannah, or anti-art kid Instagram pages like @beammeupsoftboi. Wearing your heart on your sleeve and calling it art is much more likely to win you troll-fuelled sneers than smiles; in-built romanticism will only ever get you called cringe. To a gen-Z who have metabolised an ethics of insincerity, irony as an expressive mode, and virality – whether in the form of a few likes on the group chat or through thousands of retweets from strangers – as a form of spiritual satiation, straightforward emotion often feels out of joint.
This is what is refreshing about London-based writer Lauren Bulla’s debut poetry collection Porcelain Cherries, which transmutes all this into an aesthetics of introspective self-exploration and care. She refuses to be structurally contained by the alleged emotive limits of gen-Z brainrot speak and irony politics, instead honing her voice – which she proudly tells me was never classically trained, is simply the voice she speaks to friends with – into a humbly generational one, something youthful and refreshing as a result. ‘That these hyper fixations / are only a bit of momentary fun.’ The line would be as at home on a Tumblr blog as a page of print, yet successfully appropriates and refracts social media’s pseudo-psychological jargon to interrogate through experience what it means to fall in love. ‘So close to tasting it, the very thing we’re both afraid of…’
The youthful authenticity of Bulla’s voice does recede in places, often giving way something more motherly and protective, as if she is guiding the reader through the highs and lows of modern love with a tender, if stern, hand: ‘I hate to inform you that, not without heavy cleansing / and deep dedication will you rid yourself of [regret’s] implicit stick.’ If parts of the collection then read as sinewy strings of maternal advice, there is also a certain irony in this posturing as the collection’s inaugural poem, “Six creams and six sugars”, opens with ‘My mothers voice / reminding me to be safe […] Take care of your heart / and your mind / you’ve only got one of either.’
There is thus a genealogy of feminine care to Porcelain Cherries, of girls supporting girls, as the chronically online would put it. On the book’s back, Bulla confides, ‘If nothing else, I hope this collection gives you authority to laugh in the face of heartbreak.’ Humour in the face of the collective cataclysm that is modern dating – ruined by the false sense of abundance created by dating apps and our online over- connectivity – becomes both weapon and cure, a panacea that turns pain into triumph. And it is in finding these moments of triumph through all the fog that Bulla is at her best. The collection’s final poem, “If my past lovers ever saw me – adapted”, represents the auxesis-like climax of all the emotional labour done hitherto. ‘If my past lovers saw me today […] They’d know this is because I found ways to reframe the thrashing I’ve endured […] Now I am my own lover / and there is nothing more powerful.’ Take yourself seriously, she implores, but also don’t: you must laugh and live with yourself before anybody else can.