Young and new to the Los Angeles landscape, Avan Jogia was thrust into the spotlight upon his debut performance in Nickelodeon’s “Victorious.” The show’s pilot episode, which aired in 2010, attracted an audience of millions, accumulating even more fans over the course of its four seasons. Avan Jogia has since had various roles in film and television in addition to also being widely known for his social media presence. The release of his book, “Autopsy (of an Ex-Teen Heartthrob),” is meant to be an artistic rendition of its namesake, dissecting the life of “an ex-teen heartthrob” and his progression through his career — namely, the behind-the-screen parts of his life that go unnoticed by an audience. The book begins with a few short pages of prose detailing the start of his career and his mother’s simultaneous diagnosis with ovarian cancer. Though it’s built as a memoir of sorts, “Autopsy” is made up of pages upon pages of poetry focusing on themes of fame, sex and mental health.
While primarily composed of poems, the book also includes scattered pieces of prose, though these are few and far between. The first poem promises an introspective look at Avan Jogia’s life in Hollywood, and the separate prose sections discuss how, as a teenager, he was forced to experience independence in Los Angeles after his mother went back to Canada to receive cancer treatment. In all of the novel’s prose sections, Jogia’s writing is raw, replete with dry wit and sardonic humor that instantly captures the reader’s attention. There is true poetry in his story, in describing the isolation that comes with the fame of a child actor and the hardship of navigating Hollywood while coping with a parent’s cancer diagnosis.
Yet despite its promising start, the rest of Jogia’s writing fakes its depth and fails to live up to the name of the collection, only grazing the surface of the issues it claims to address while revealing little about Jogia himself. Jogia’s vague and contrived descriptions of fame and “coming of age” focus on his experiences on set or the unhealthy relationships people often form with celebrities, delivered in the form of “wisdom.” It screams to prove its poignancy, to insist that it is profound. The unfortunate product is a series of cliché-adjacent phrases and notes-app style poetry that could have been meaningful, if only it hadn’t been chopped into a few lines for the allure of being mysterious.
Insulting the intelligence of the reader, Jogia spoon-feeds us the most fundamental themes, from “I know what it feels like to be used” to “ego is a sickness.” Poetry should evoke thinking, using figurative language or symbolism to set a rhythm to the writing and leave the reader with questions. It is a writer’s job to trust that their readers will spend time with their work and try to decipher it. Bringing critical analysis into poetry allows for deeper engagement, but readers will be unable to do that here. Instead, Jogia does not match these demands of good poetry, often ending his poems with a sentence summarizing the exact point he intended to make with the poem, removing the intellectual nature of analysis and watering down the reading experience in doing so.
Other poems in the collection are even lazier; in actuality, they have a title followed by a series of related words listed on for two pages, masquerading as poetry. A few in particular go by the title “_____ as” and list various words with some relation to one another. In these instances, Jogia seems to be throwing out random words, expecting the reader to write the poetry themselves. Jogia is more intent on convincing us that his words are profound than actually writing something that fits the bill and, as a result, little thinking is required to delve into his poetry. It isn’t difficult to understand, simply because there isn’t anything deeper there to uncover.
Though some might believe that this lack of depth reflects a fault in all modern poetry, many writers today write poetry with the richness and care the craft deserves. From Billy Collins to Ocean Vuong, modern poetry has its own style and structure that possesses its own kind of beauty. These poets comment on love, lust, technology and the vastness of the human experience with the same fervor as older poets. They take something that is universal about human life and make it their own.
Contemporary “Instagram poetry,” though, deviates from this pattern of excellence these are the poems which are actually just a few fake-deep sentences, indented at certain points to add a rhythm. If these pieces were put back together, it would just be a sentence that, in all reality, would probably sit unsent in the drafts of your tweets. Writing doesn’t have to be flowery and overwritten to have meaning. In fact, despite the failure of his poems, Jogia’s prose — which is arguably less overwritten — contained more meaning than his poetry, which only managed to scratch the surface.
The phenomena of lazy poetry has not begun with nor will it end with Jogia — though “Autopsy” acts as a prime example. Great poetry is individualistic, explicating the deepest parts of a poet’s soul while readers become bystanders to their experiences. Truly compelling poems are not written for a reader, but for the poet. Through this individuality, readers discover a connection with the poet who does more than mold themselves into something consumable, a product rather than an artist.
Following the rise of “Instagram poetry,” however, poems must be relatable to be appreciated. How could a contemporary reader ever be expected to read from a perspective other than their own? Jogia clearly writes for an audience, addressing the reader directly, reminding them that they are not themselves part of the poetry but instead reading words on a page. He writes that his life has been a performance in which he serves himself up on a platter for the entertainment of others and that, by contrast, this book is him cutting himself open and laying himself bare on a sterile hospital bed for everyone to examine in his rawest form. Despite this sentiment, the actual poems in “Autopsy,” in both structure and language, hold the reader at arm’s length, never fully allowing for a deep understanding of their purpose or, through them, their author. It begs the question: In the name of accessibility, have we forfeited quality?
My critiques of this book are deeply connected to how much potential it had. Certain themes rang true throughout, such as the sexualization of teenagers in the entertainment industry or the isolation that comes with child acting. This could have been a point of deeper discussion if Jogia was willing to go there, but instead he stayed in the shallow waters of his verse and missed out on the opportunity to provide deeper commentary on these issues. I found scattered lines that possessed hints of something deeper, but we, as readers, lacked the necessary context to understand them.
I scoured the poems hoping for one that would change the way I felt about this collection, but, ultimately, we cannot connect with a piece of work that does not allow us to. This collection is a tumultuous reading experience; I was begging for it to let me in, but I discovered that a work may be accessible in writing while also being entirely closed off in thought. Jogia’s writing reminds us why it is important to write with identity, to seek out literature outside our comfort zones and, most importantly, to aim for poetry to be a window into the writer, rather than a performance, dancing for the entertainment of readers.
Daily Arts Writer Archisha Pathak can be reached at archpath@umich.edu.
