The day after the 2016 US presidential election, media outlets that had gorged themselves on sensational gossip throughout the campaign quickly pivoted into a therapeutic role. By early afternoon on 9 November, Newsweek published ‘How to Survive a Trump Presidency’, and Teen Vogue explained ‘How to Cope with Fear after the Presidential Election’. Among these rem-edies, it didn't take long for digital publications to begin prescribing poetry. That same day, HuffPost recommended ‘18 Compassionate Poems to Help You Weather Uncertain Times’, Vox asked ‘Feeling Terrible Right Now? Maybe Some Poetry Will Help’, and BuzzFeed posted Danez Smith's poem ‘You’re Dead, America’, apparently written overnight in response to the news, and which promptly went viral. The following day, mainstream outlets played catch- up. The Atlantic posted an interview with the editor of Poetry magazine under the headline ‘Still, Poetry Will Rise’, the Guardian offered ‘Words for Solace and Strength: Poems to Counter the Election Fallout’, and CNN suggested ‘Langston Hughes Is Helping People Get through This Election’. The heralding of poetry's resurgence continued through the end of 2016 and into 2017. ‘Don't Look Now, But 2016 is Resurrecting Poetry’, Wired proposed in the weeks after the election, while the Los Angeles Times reported that ‘Donald Trump has roused the poets to stinging verse’. ViewPoint published a longer meditation on ‘Poetry after Trump’ the following February; in March 2017, the Guardian continued to explain ‘Why Poetry is the Perfect Weapon to Fight Donald Trump’; and in April, the New York Times published ‘Poems of Resistance: A Primer’. Speaking from a rally in Washington that month for an article headlined ‘American Poets, Refusing to Go Gentle, Rage Against the Right’, the poet Jane Hirshfield told the Times: ‘Poems are visible right now, which is terribly ironic, because you rather wish it weren't so necessary.’ In an interview with the London Times published on the last day of 2017, the Scottish poet Jackie Kay suggested ‘people need poetry even more’ in ‘these particular times’.

Beyond individual pronouncements, their synchronised spread begs questions about the structural forces behind the phenomenon. Tempting as it is to take poetry's ‘resurrection’ at face value, I want to suggest that blind faith in poetry's cultural or political value overlooks its network value in a changing media landscape.