Springsteen

Why is Amanda Gorman's superbowl poem a "poem" and Bruce Springsteen's Jeep commercial not a "poem"? (I don't know who wrote the commercial, but it is better written than the Gorman piece, arguably.) We have things that we call "poems," setting them apart from other texts. Gorman's rhymes, but that seems a bit odd as a criterion, since most poems do not rhyme anymore. (The belief that that is the criterion seems a bit third grade to me.) 

Setting off the text as a poem is inviting a kind of scrutiny of it, then. If I used the phrase "nutritional supplement" in a poem, then I would hear its sound and rhythm. Its polysyllabical lightness would be  dactylic now. We would see the phrase itself as a little bit sill. You'd expect it to be used with a sense of irony, producing an intersection between poetic language and real life uses of the phrase nutritional supplement. 

The word educator in the Gorman poem is case in point. I've never referred to myself as an educator because it sounds like a pretentious euphemism for teacher. 

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I read something saying that the Jeep commercial is implicitly white supremacist. There's that, too. To me, that's overthinking it a bit. My first reaction was being puzzled at what it was a commercial for. I didn't even recognize Springsteen til someone I was watching the game with pointed it out.  It just seemed like decontextualized political rhetoric. Then, Jeep somehow epitomizes these values. Then Jeep pulled the commercial because of Bruce's DWI.