00:00 Hi, my name is Tyco Say, and today we're going to talk about something that I think is very important and is becoming more important and that you will find important whether you're into the subject or not. And that precisely is what exactly is poetry and what will poetry be in the future. I'm particularly interested in this perspective, not from or interested in this topic, not from a discussion of literature or any established forms of poetry, but rather from poetry as a concept and a practice that we all already do. The purpose of this talk is for anybody

01:05 who wants to write poetry, wants to experience poetry, or wants to expand their understanding of poetry to live in a world and experience their surroundings in a way that's more unique and special to them. After this talk, you'll understand a couple of key principles. One, that poetry is a subjective response to the world that we all individually have because we are individuals and we are subjects, we aren't objects. The other thing that you might understand is that we are, we all have the ability, despite what we're told, despite what kind of education or

01:46 experiences we have, we all have the ability to experience this subjective response to the world. I'm going to break down this topic in a couple of different ways, but particularly I'm thinking about the idea of what poetry is from two key kind of ways of thinking. The first way of thinking is this concept of genre. Where do we get genre? What creates a genre? What maintains and sustains and what is the future of genre? And the second is the process of experiencing a poem and the effects of that which is perhaps poetry. Some people may not agree with everything that I'm going to say

02:26 and to them I say I respect your opinion, but I think my objective, as I said in this talk, is to encourage more people to experience poetry, more people to engage with poetry in a way that's accessible to them, in a way that's subjective and dependent on their own experiences and abilities or lack of abilities. I would like to live in a world where there is more reception and awareness of how we exist in the world and how we fall in love with the world. Maybe before I get into the weeds of things, I'd like to just say one thing and one of my favorite

03:10 writers, Richard Hugo, he said poetry is perhaps falling in love with the way that you see the world. I like that quote because it talks about intuitively in the quote itself, it's about subjectivity, it's about a personal experience and it also says the way that you experience the world. It doesn't say that the way that you experience the world is perhaps better than the way that someone else experiences the world. It's talking about something deeply personal and I think that that's a really cool way to think about poetry. If we like this quote, we can also try to think

03:56 about what do our educational systems look like to encourage that kind of mentality and approach towards poetry which is literary or non-literary. The first thing that I'd like to talk about today is the concept of genre. Genre, I would like to break down into four main components which also have sub-components. I'm going to write them down on this big board here that you can see or can't see, nobody knows. Genre, the first thing that we should know about genre is that we must consider purpose, we must consider audience and we must consider voice and lastly context.

04:57 You know, I'm going to get rid of this board because it's kind of annoying but we're going to dive into these aspects of purpose, audience, voice and context and the four layers of genre to help us give it a fuller understanding of what poetry is or perhaps isn't. When we think of purpose, we think about the intention of the thing and here I'm saying thing because I want to discuss poetry not as a literary aspect or literary practice only. Of course, we do have poetry in literature writing but by the end of this talk I hope that we will get to this idea that poetry

05:34 doesn't have to be just on the page. Either way, let's start with purpose. We have the intention behind the author of the text, the producer of the thing, producer of the text, producer of the image, producer of the movement. This is what they want to achieve with the thing. The way that we achieve certain things is by considering well where is that thing going to exist and that is what we call context which we break into time and place where the text or thing is produced and where the time and place or the time and place where the thing is received. So we

06:18 have kind of a intended context and an actual context where the actual thing is received. Here's one example of this. I'm going to come to this idea of comedy quite often because it's very easy for us to see when an aspect of genre breaks down the effects of that. So let's take a joke from the 90s. I don't know, a joke from a different context. It could be from any time. It could be from anywhere actually. In its origin context, in its target context, the purpose was probably, could have been to be funny but now in a different context, the same joke, the same

06:59 text, the same thing now has a completely different effect due to its context, due to the way that it's received. Now, of course, all of these things go beyond the effects of the joke, of the poetry, of the art. It goes beyond just the conventions of the thing, how the joke is created. It goes into the context, what is happening around the text, the context, the things happening right next to the joke or the poem or the piece of art or these things. And we know that all of these things affect the way that we see the world as individuals. So this is purpose and this is

07:45 context. Purpose, we have an intended purpose and as I kind of mentioned, we have the effect of a text but we also have something else which is received purpose. So maybe this would have been more beneficial if I started off the conversation not with genre but actually with communication. And so I'm going to step back just a little bit and I want us to be thinking about when something is produced and something is received. I'm saying these things very broadly because poetry, a poem can be produced and a poem can be received. The question is, is it the same

08:26 poem? If we are subjective, if we understand the world differently than the other person, then intuitively we are going to receive the effects of that test in a different way. So and that's a little bit of audience which we'll talk about here in a second, but we also have the reception of the context, reception of the space, reception of the time, reception of the relationship between the producer as well. If you are speaking to someone who you think is a best friend and you make a joke that would be suitable for best friends but they don't

09:03 really view you as a best friend, that text is going to be received differently. This is a natural process, this is a natural thing because we're sub-subjects. We live and interpret the world that we live in differently and individually and that is beautiful. I'm going to be coming back to the beauty of individuality quite often in this discussion. So again with purpose, we have the intended purpose, we have the effect and then we have the received intended purpose. I want to break this down, the received intended purpose. So imagine a situation where you are

09:47 speaking with someone and they make a joke and you interpret their joke actually as making a dig at you. You think that they're insulting you, you think that they're making fun of you, you received the intended purpose of their joke as being insulting. Now because this happens to all of us, we know that that's not always the case. Perhaps that person was just making a joke but read the context differently. Maybe they didn't think that you and them are on a certain type of playing field of friendship if you will and therefore the intended purpose, the received purpose and

10:34 the effect are all mismatching. Mismatching is what creates a miscommunication. Miscommunication is when we interpret something the way that was not intended. When we have many mismatches in this in these variables of genre, they lead to miscommunications and I just want to be clear that miscommunications aren't necessarily a bad thing. I'm going to come back to this later but perhaps this is all we have actually as humans, miscommunications. I'll come back to that. So along with context, we said target context. I actually said three things. I said the origin

11:18 context where the text originated from, the time and place where the text originated from, the target context where the text is supposed to be intended to be received and when it is supposed to be received and I presume similar with purpose we also have received intended context like where a receiver would think that the producer intended for the text to be received. Here's a good example of all of this, a diary. So the purpose of the diary is subjective and relative to the producer. I guess the producer and the receiver should be the same person if it's a personal diary.

12:04 The target context would be hopefully to only be read and explored in a personal space in a bedroom or something without other people. In actual context, we can imagine where a diary might be picked up and read in a context in which it wasn't intended for from an audience that it wasn't intended for and therefore this could also change the effect of the text. Now I'm not saying anything crazy here. Yeah, you read someone else's diary, it has a different effect. It's funny, you laugh at them perhaps whereas the purpose of that text, even though it's the

12:45 same thing, it's the same text, the purpose of that diary entry might be completely different for the producer of the text but we see here this very fundamental thing that the same thing, the text, I keep saying text and I'm using the word text as a placeholder for poetry, for a dance move, for a painting, anything that you can receive and therefore interpret. The same text can have a different effect, dependence on these four variables of purpose, context, and now I'm talking about audience. I'd like to break down audience in two ways.

13:22 One, we have target audience. I'm sure we've heard this before, who the text is intended for, who it is targeted at, and then we have a couple of different words for this. I like to call it implicated audience or maybe a better word would be just the actual audience. So we can imagine a situation where a target audience and an actual audience don't match up and therefore it is a bit different than the effect of the text is influenced by that mismatch in target audience and implicated audience. The last of the four pillars that I would like to discuss is voice. If you've taken a

14:06 writing class before, actually I feel like you know maybe everyone is familiar with this term writer's voice. You might, we may have heard before, I really like your writer's voice. You have a good voice. I can hear your voice. Well, what does this actually mean? And I think the best way to break it down, a writer's voice, is in two subsections, which is content. This is the information that the thing has, the text has, and format, which is how the information is presented. It's the container, if you will. So a writer's voice, we all have ideas, but the way that we formulate

14:48 these ideas creates our voice. We could break this down probably even further, and we should maybe in a different session and talk about, of course, how words also have content and every word has a diff, every word is somewhat of a format of, for an idea. These kind of essential ideas that you, the essential notions that you can describe anything in a variety of different words, but when we describe something in different words, that thing is different. The word shapes and meaning, if you will. So we have purpose, intended purpose, received intention, and we have effect.

15:34 We have audience, target audience, implicated audience, or actual audience. We have voice, which is content, the ideas of the text, and format, the container of the ideas. And then last but not least, we have context, which is the time and place where the text is produced and received. So how do all of these work together to create our understanding of poetry? This is a really fascinating thing. See, I think as soon as one of these four variables break down, it creates an opportunity for interpretation. It creates a gray area. It creates where something isn't directly

16:21 communicated. And by the way, is it possible to directly communicate anything to anybody? I mean, why do we have miscommunications when we quote unquote, speak the same language? Shouldn't we never have any miscommunication? And the answer is, of course, we have miscommunications because we are subjects, we are individuals existing within our own individual contexts with our own experiences, whether they are life experiences or language experiences, artistic experiences, whatever. They create gray areas for interpretation. And interpretation is precisely

17:02 well interpretation is the receiving and analyzing of a text, if you will.

17:12 Now, we can interpret things to different degrees, of course, by interpreting something, we can be producing a text. If someone says something that sounds a little funny to you, you can interpret it as funny. And you're therefore changing the text and how it exists to you, the effect of it, then you might also acknowledge that the intended purpose was to be serious. But the received the effect of the text, you decided to make it funny and re appropriate its meaning. This is, you know, this kind of reception is a type of production, it's producing

17:58 a new effect of a text. And I think that is just as important as one the text itself, and to the producers intention of the text, I wouldn't like to live in a world and I don't think anybody else would either, to where all text that is intended, is matching how it is received and the effect of the text. Can we imagine where we have all direct communication, I mean, a world where we speak in binary, a world that we live in a controlled context, by the way, where a text is produced and received and controlled content and format and target audience and purposes matched up directly.

18:45 If we lived in a world like that, I'm afraid we would have no poetry, we'd have no creative understanding of the world, we'd have no comedy, we would have no fun in understanding, you know, it's quite bizarre, but it also makes so much sense that in 2026, we have this technology, AI from large language models, because so much is packed within human language, so much is packed within the relationship between words, and communication and miscommunication.

19:23 That we have these huge models that encapsulate so many human experiences within words and language, and so I want to encourage, as we move forward in this discussion, opportunities to interpret language, opportunities to understand the intended purpose, understand the target audience, understand the content and format, the voice of a writer and target context and how these things can be manipulated for different textual effects, whether it's poetry, or whether it's comedy. So this is genre. Another word that I'd like to introduce here is convention, and genre is

20:09 built off of conventions, shared conventions, re-established conventions, conventions that are either prescribed to us within professional systems and social organizations like education, like textbooks, like any kind of larger authority that shows integrity and communication and presentation of convention. But primarily, we need to understand that all of these things are social, and this isn't a new thing, obviously, but any kind of social convention is dependent on the society and the society's values, and how the society is engaging with these conventions.

20:58 And so when we are prescribed conventions and how to interpret something, and I want to, this is very important because when we're prescribed ways to interpret poetry, prescribed ways to interpret comedy, prescribed ways in how to produce poetry, produce comedy, then we are, this is a form of conditionalization, it's a form of flattening, it's a form of saying, this is the way that this should be. Now, let's go back to that binary situation. Can you imagine trying to tell a joke in a controlled context where we're speaking in controlled language?

21:51 We would understand poetry, but we wouldn't, it wouldn't affect us in the way that poetry may affect us today. We would understand that a joke is being told, but we wouldn't laugh. We'd say, aha, that's comedy. I recognize the conventions being used or quote unquote misused. So we run into this very interesting thing where,

22:19 you know, in the 1960s in the United States, when we created institutionalized art academies, where you could graduate with a degree in liberal arts, we began as the society started thinking about how can we conventionalize, and maybe it wasn't with, with bad motives at the time, but how can, how can we put these abstract thoughts, abstract opportunities for interpretation into some kind of program and that teaches skills and test skills in order to, I don't know, create, encourage, I don't know, can you create if you're, if you're given a set, set amount of rules or

23:13 context in which you can produce them, ways to interpret art, these kinds of things. I mean, it's a very fascinating 21st or 20th century thing that still goes on into the 21st century though it is changing because when we go back to genre, when we are receiving any of, receiving a text whatsoever, we have the ability to understand the conventions that are being used and ability to understand the conventions that are misused. And we have an understand that we have an ability to just understand the text and the way that we understand it. But we're told that

24:00 we should not understand the text in the way that we understand it. There's a right way to understand it. Of course, there's a gray area of we need to understand language to be able to understand words to be able to understand sentences and thoughts and, and communicate knowledge. But when it comes to expression, it's almost that language itself is a already flawed. When we're writing, creating art or creating any kind of human expression, we're translating feelings into the writer's voice, into conventions, into words, into colors,

24:47 into strokes, or these kind of things. That is if we have the product created already in our mind, and I'm trying to translate that through conventions that are known within our target context. Obvious case here is words is stanzas is any kind of literary conventions that we utilize, but that they're received as a kind of common denominator between the producer and the receiver of the text. This makes sense. But does human expression have to be like that? Does human expression have to be a product? We know that capitalism requires conventions so that you can

25:29 sell it. In order to sell a product, you must be able to talk about the product in a way that the target audience can understand the product. You can't talk about features with words that the target audience doesn't know. Otherwise, they won't be able to buy the product. Why do we create? Why do we match this same kind of thinking with human expression? Well, because it looks good in hotel lobbies. Well, because I need to pay my rent. Well, because

26:05 I need to make money from it. But is that what art is? Is art a product to make money from? Sure. Sure. Maybe that's what the Institute created an ability to market and communicate your work. But do you see the disconnect here? We're talking about genre, we're talking about language, communicating about something so abstract that I mean, something that could be abstract. And that brings me to the second chapter of this discussion, which is the process. We talked about the product, and obviously you need conventions for a product in order to

26:46 communicate it. But there's also the process of creating, which I think is ties very closely actually to the discussion of genre, because there's the process of producing, but there's also the process of receiving. If art is subjective, which it is, because we are subjects,

27:11 and we prescribe our own interpretation to objects, like a poem, like a painting, like a film, then we should also encourage the process of reception, the process of subjective reception. And we should applaud that we should encourage that because if we prescribe how something should be interpreted, we're automatically leaving people out of that discussion. Now, like I said at the beginning of the talk, if that is the purpose, then that's your purpose. My purpose is to encourage more people to engage in the arts. Now, there's a very interesting

27:55 kind of problem in what I'm saying here, though, because if everyone is provided the opportunity to interpret, that means that there is infinite ways to interpret something, and that is great. But what creates the power of art then? And I want you to think about this briefly. What creates the power of an inside joke? An inside joke is only funny because it was intended for a specific target audience, and it derived from a specific context, and it was appropriated for a new context, for a new purpose, for a new effect. The same language item appropriated to a new context,

28:55 for a new purpose, for a new effect, and it is hilarious. We love inside jokes. In fact, the entire art world derives on this very same concept that I'm talking about right now.

29:12 Understanding past conventions from another context, being appropriated for a new context, for a new purpose, to have a different effect. You've got to know the rules and how people are using the conventions in a new way to achieve something else. This is the basic premise of all conventions within all human expression. It couldn't be another way, or could there be another way? Because right now, we're talking about the exclusion at the convention level. At the context level is perhaps something a little bit different. If we just imagine

29:58 that for art to have power, it needs to have exclusion. It needs to have some people say, I get it, and you don't. I was there, and you weren't. I know the power of this. This piece is powerful because I am interpreting it in a specific way, and my friends here are also interpreting it in a specific way. If everyone interpreted the same way, it wouldn't be so powerful, but we interpret it in this way, and that makes it powerful, the inside joke.

30:32 If we take that same model and apply it to all human expression, I mean, we're just talking about context here. You were there when the text was produced, and

30:44 you were there when the text was appropriated.

30:49 So, I wonder if the future of human expression could be context-dependent only, only relies on context. Let's imagine that for a second. Get rid of conventions, get rid of ideas, and the container of ideas, content and format, and just think about context and the power of context, the power of authenticity, the power of being there. This is why it's so interesting in 2026 to think about the power of context because we are striving for authenticity today. We want to feel something. We want something that's real. We don't want to read something

31:28 if we think that it has a hint of AI in it. We are skeptical of the news, of films, of pictures, of the people that we speak to online. Are they real? We want something authentic. We don't want anything. AI can create the perfect writer's voice. It has the best ideas, and they're formatted in the best way. Maybe not right now. Maybe you still can detect it, but that's only going to get better. You won't be able to decipher AI from human writing very, very soon. The same with photos, same with videos, same with music,

32:07 same with poetry, paintings. People are now applauding people for good prompt usage. This is a whole different discussion, but I believe, and I might be, many people might not agree with me on this, but I believe that the future of art or the future of human expression has to go in the direction of being more authentic and being more radically human. The question is, what does radically human actually mean? And I think that that is providing opportunities for interpretation, not making things correctly, creating things that are

32:56 dependent only on the moment, not worrying about perfect ideas or how the ideas are formulated, but rather on the experience, on the process of reception. Going to bad concerts,

33:11 having an experience that you can't replace again. I mean, this is what we want. We already have everything that's perfect. I have all the music in the world on Spotify. I can learn how to use any program on YouTube. I can watch any film, but I don't because it's boring because it's all there. I have it all. I want to feel something that has purpose and I have agency and I'm having some kind of experience. And so this is where we get the idea that the future of poetry, the future of art, the future of any kind of human expression is dependent on this process,

33:55 this contextually driven experience and curation that is completely dependent on the human context and our ability to receive and interpret the world. We're going to have a good time when we do that. Hey, why are you laughing at me? I'm just talking about poetry. My wife just came home. Nice to meet you. Would you like to say anything about poetry? Hi, nice to meet you. What would be your number one thing to say about the future of poetry and art? Look at the camera though.

34:43 I don't see much of a future for poetry for cool people. They will remain there, but only for Snopes, unless object paradise becomes worldwide famous and then poetry is cool again. So basically emphasizing the process of poetics and genre theory, which is good.

35:10 I think that's about it there. We'd love to hear what you think. And I'll see you on another episode of Taika Talks About Absolutely Nothing.