Buck-knife the beatnik: an up-and-coming poet

I dabble in writing angsty teenage poems from time to time with my only known influence being Shel Silverstein as I have read almost no other poetry that I remembered. I kind of remember some of Tennyson, and I liked “Ozymandias,” but that’s all I remember from sophomore year English class. I do like Romantic Era poetry, but I like Romantic Era anything. 

What I’m getting at is that for someone that writes poems for this blog, I don’t actually read much poetry. I’ve decided to change that recently so that I could try write good angsty poems instead of teenage ones, but I was at a loss. Where do I start? There are so many movements and writers and styles and formats– how am I supposed to find inspiration when everything’s been done before?

Epiphany: I see poetry on TikTok literally all the time. It’s normally those really corny ones that are written all lowercase on a GoogleDoc or something and all the comments are making fun of the fact that it’s stolen almost word for word from a John green book, but for the past 3 or 4 months, I’ve been getting poetry that I actually like. I know that the syntax doesn’t do this revelation justice, but trust me, that is truly a feat. In the infinite content of that app, the algorithm brought me Nico Demers, aka Buck-knife.

I fell in love with the way he read his work with emotion and earnest, because when I read my work, I can’t help but turn on some kind of voice or accent as a coping mechanism for the fact that I simply cannot hear my own writing out loud without cringing. 

Demers’ diction ebbs and flows with the cadence of someone telling a story to a friend after a long time apart. I feel like he’s confiding in me when I hear his videos, and it makes me nostalgic for a time that I didn’t experience. When I saw that he had a book, it wasn’t even a question. It could have been a virus for all I knew, but I stuck my credit card information into that sketchy plugin like it was a little cheese toastie in a wee toaster oven, guv’na. And then I bought another one, just in case. You never know. 

I tore through this book with a smile on my face for each poem. His concise structure leaves the naive and earnest word choice feeling intentional and infinitely descriptive about exactly what feeling he’s trying to convey. Even the epilogue on the last page brought me genuine, child-like joy. When I read his work, I feel like a kid discovering poetry for the first time: suddenly, a space between words, a selectively placed comma– even an expletive before a specific word has such a youthful effect on the message of the poem, and his vocal delivery makes it so much more genuine. 

Within the pages of his book, he’s growing up and shrinking down a million times over. Demers leaves none of this imagery to the imagination because in his eyes, everything he’s ever seen is an organism teeming with life and agenda. Flesh tears, animals consume, throats swallow: personification runs rampant in his work and I personally feel it never gets old. This device’s repetition makes the reader feel like an atomic David in a world of molecular Goliaths: alone and simple against a world built of other worlds.

I truly recommend at least checking out his TikTok, and if you have the same positive experience as me, I also suggest that you buy his new book, Guts. His poetry is honest and relatable, but it’s vulnerable enough to make anyone turn inward and apply his words to themselves. We all feel like spilling our guts to anyone that’ll listen and forget, but Demers lets his guts rot on the pages of his books and in videos for the world to peruse, and I commend him greatly for spreading his poetry to young and insecure writers like me that have no idea what their voice is yet. 

I’ve made an oath to read more poetry from the beat movement of the ’50s and some surrealism, but any time I hear the name Kerouac, I just think of Freaks and Geeks. It’ll be an uphill battle to not get distracted by the thought of Linda Cardellini, but I figure the more I read, the less angsty and pretentious I’ll seem. That way I can just be good and pretentious. It’s all worth it to build consistency and confidence in my writing until I can read my poetry out loud like Demers rather than panicked like Hailee Steinfield in Pitch Perfect 2. No one wants to be Hailee Steinfield in Pitch Perfect 2. That riff-off was wack. 

His TikTok can be found at bucknife__ and you can purchase book at his website. Nico Demers (aka Buck-knife) has started my journey to find my voice in poetry, and I hope you find the same hope in his words that I did.