The Woah Vicky poetry reading was oddly endearing

“I got people trying to benefit off my motion,” Woah Vicky chants. Some of them are in this very room. It’s a sticky Saturday evening in mid-June at le PÈRE on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and we’re crammed so close the air conditioning can’t keep up. We’re all here for the suddenly announced poetry reading by Woah Vicky — Internet oddity turned ultraniche nano-celebrity — hoping the absurd can truly become sublime, or at least that something worth posting about on social media might happen inside this vividly yellow storefront.

I’m not a close follower of Vicky’s antics, but lately I feel as though half the conversations I have with musicians, from Rio Da Yung OG to Ninajirachi to Nino Paid, inevitably circle around to the ways the Internet warps the world around us, and subsequently, the ways we live. The whole event felt like a microcosm for collective desensitization: a crowd treating an E-list microceleb as their personal lolcow might not be that serious in the grand scheme of things.

Then again, the entire reading was being streamed by right-wing adjacent platform Kick, and tickets were being sold for as much as $99 (no word on who was buying). Maybe it’s a little more serious than we’d care to admit.

As a teenager, Woah Vicky notched derisive viral fame in the latter half of 2010s for her use of the N-word and near-blackface spraytan, actions the Atlanta native defended by claiming to literally be Black à la Rachel Dolezal. She would later apologize and promise to stop using the slur, though she’s slipped up as recently as this past winter.

Eventually, a public-facing beef with rising Internet personalities Bhad Bhabie and Lil Tay in 2017 would net Vicky quasi-fame among the deeply online and irony-fried. She was still a couple rings lower than a traditional influencer, but joking about her typo-riddled tweets became first a sort of IYKYK signal, then a more established vernacular.

Over the past few years in particular, Woah Vicky’s posts have become reliable engagement fodder for Instagram memepages and bluecheck X accounts. Now, she's endured enough news cycles to sink into the background hum of the algorithm, famous only in that peculiarly modern and parasocial way that Tiktokers and Twitter posters can be. Lately, Vicky's been kicking around with hyper-conservative streamer Clavicular, which offers some insight into the sort of audience she’s been courting.

Still, when the announcement came down that Woah Vicky would be reading poetry in NYC, I was morbidly curious. Seeing Vicky alongside Tiktoker Harry Daniels and Substacker Caroline Calloway felt like a terminally online extreme, a way to glimpse some truth about our digital lives that I just couldn’t grasp in my day to day life.

So I’d arrived late with a friend, and we’d shimmied between seated attendees as Calloway stalled for time before reading some “originally translated Latin poems.” It was followed by a short story by novelist Avigayl Sharp that was so much better than anything else during the evening, I felt bad she was stuck on such a shitty lineup. I was mildly charmed by Daniels, who serenaded Woah Vicky with an original song I did not hate.

Against this brainrot backdrop, Vicky’s simple, unaffected poetry felt endearing, occasionally even touching. Ranging in length from one-liners to stream-of-consciousness text blocks, her poems closely mirror her tweets, but the change of medium shifted the valence of her tossed-off thoughts to more earnest than laughable.

Well, not for the majority of the crowd. A line about wanting to adopt autistic children when she’s more settled was met with chuckles; ditto a line about her father asking her mother to get an abortion. I don’t think anyone walked into the Woah Vicky poetry reading expecting a transcendent literary experience, or solely to make fun of everything happening; maybe I’m a sucker for feeling moved by, “there almost wasn’t a Vicky to say Woah to.”

But as low-brow and unglamorous as Victoria’s truth may be, it is her truth, and the people in that room all took three hours out of our Saturday night to sweatily hear her out. It’s a shame everyone was only there for the plot: if they’d listened a little closer, they might have heard a compelling story.