The poem that begins Our generation will be known for nothing
is a reversible poem written by Jordan Nichols, an American eighth grader who was 14 at the time. Read from the first line down, it is a bitter verdict on young people who chase money and give up easily. Read from the last line back up to the first, the very same lines turn into a promise to work hard, stay kind and prove the doubters wrong. His older brother, Derek Nichols, shared a photo of the handwritten page on Twitter in late February 2014, and within days it was being passed around news sites and classrooms.
Below you can see the poem as Derek posted it, followed by a look at how the trick works, where the form comes from, why a teenager's take on his own generation struck such a nerve, and how you can try writing one yourself.
Jordan Nichols's poem as shared by his brother Derek on Twitter. Read it top to bottom first, then start at the last line and climb back up.
Who wrote it and how it spread
Derek Nichols posted the picture with a short note saying his 14-year-old brother had written it. There was no publicity campaign behind it, no school press release and no viral marketing; it was simply a proud sibling sharing homework he found impressive. Within weeks the tweet had been picked up by Elite Daily and a string of other sites, and the image travelled far beyond the family's own circle.
Part of the appeal was the age of the author. Adults complain about young people all the time, so a teenager who voices the same complaints, and then flips them into a statement of resolve, makes a neat answer to the critics. The poem also rewards a second reading in a way most social-media posts do not: you have to actually stop, scroll back and read it upside down to get the point.
Very little else is publicly known about Jordan Nichols, and that is how it should be for a young student who never sought attention. What matters here is the text and the idea behind it.
How the poem works
The poem is built from short lines that can lean either forward or backward. Many of them are fragments such as "Thinking that", "Giving up" or "Working hard". On their own they mean little; their sense depends on whether the line above or the line below finishes the thought.
Take the pair about kindness. Going down the page, the reader meets a line praising loving, respectful behaviour and then the line that follows labels it a dumb thing to do
. Going up the page, the same praise is instead completed by the line that sat above it, which calls it the way to go
. Nothing changes except direction.
A few other devices make the switch convincing:
- Hinge words. Phrases like "Was a joke" or "Is a waste" can attach to either neighbour, so they flip their target.
- Punctuation that rarely blocks. Most lines end without a full stop, letting each one run into whichever line comes next.
- A turning line at the end. The downward reading closes with a note telling the reader to go back up, which works as the pivot of the whole poem.
- Mirror framing. The bleak first line becomes the last line of the hopeful reading, so the ending answers the opening rather than repeating it.
The result is a small lesson in how much meaning depends on order. The words about failure and the words about effort are all there in both readings. What the reader concludes depends on which way they choose to travel.
Was it copied? The "Lost Generation" connection
Soon after the poem spread, some readers pointed out that it closely resembles "Lost Generation" by Jonathan Reed. Reed, then a student in Chicago, made a short video of his own reversible poem for AARP's "U@50" YouTube contest in 2007. It reads as despair from top to bottom and as hope from bottom to top, and the video went on to draw well over a million views. Reed in turn took the idea, and the scroll-down-then-up visual, from "Truth", an Argentine political advertisement by the party RECREAR that won a silver Lion at Cannes in 2006.
So the concept was not new in 2014, and Jordan's poem clearly belongs to the same family: a gloomy reading about a generation, a reversal, a hopeful finish. But the actual lines are different. Comparing the two texts, they share the idea and some of the mood, not the wording. It is entirely plausible that a 14-year-old saw Reed's video in class, where it is sometimes shown, and wrote his own version. That is how many poets learn a form: by imitating a model and then filling it with their own words.
A fair way to read it, then, is as an original poem in an established form, much as a student might write an original sonnet without having invented the sonnet.
An old trick: palindromes made of lines
Writers have been playing with text that runs both ways for at least two thousand years. The Latin Sator square, found scratched on a wall at Pompeii in the first century AD, reads the same in four directions. A Greek line attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus, "Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin" (wash your sins, not only your face), reads the same letter by letter backwards and was carved on baptismal fonts, including one at Hagia Sophia.
Those are letter palindromes. Poems like Jordan's work on a bigger scale. In word-unit palindromes, made popular among wordplay enthusiasts by the British writer J. A. Lindon in the 1960s, the sentence is reversed word by word. In line-unit palindromes, the lines stay intact but their order is reversed, and the second half has to make fresh sense. Jordan's poem is a variation on that idea: rather than repeating itself, it asks the reader to perform the reversal.
Why it struck a nerve: the "kids these days" effect
The downward reading voices what older people have said about the young for a very long time. In 2019 psychologists John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a study in Science Advances on what they called the "kids these days" effect. They found that people who score high on a trait, such as respect for authority, intelligence or love of reading, are especially likely to think today's children lack it. When the researchers led some participants to believe they were weaker readers, those people became more charitable toward young people.
The authors suggest that we project our present selves onto our memories of being young, then judge the new generation against a past that never quite existed. Complaints of this kind can be traced back thousands of years.
Seen that way, Jordan's poem does something clever. It first repeats the criticism in its harshest form, then shows that the same raw material can support the opposite conclusion. It does not deny that problems exist; it argues that what a generation becomes is still being decided.
How to write your own reverse poem
Teachers often use this kind of poem in lessons because it combines grammar, logic and feeling. If you want to try one:
- Pick two opposite statements. Write the bleak version as your first line and the hopeful version as your last; in the reversed reading they swap roles.
- Draft in pairs. Write a claim and a judgment on separate lines, such as a value on one line and "is pointless" or "is what matters" on the next, so each judgment can attach to the line above or below.
- Use fragments. Short lines like "We knew that" or "Unless" can link to either neighbour and make the turn easier.
- Keep punctuation light. A full stop in the wrong place breaks the reversal, so test both directions after every change.
- Read it aloud both ways. If either reading sounds forced, move a line or split it in two.
Expect to rewrite many times. The difficulty is the point: when both readings finally hold, you understand your own sentences much better than before.
Sources: Poem by Jordan Nichols, image shared by Derek Nichols on Twitter; earlier coverage by Elite Daily; "Lost Generation" video by Jonathan Reed; Poem Analysis: The Lost Generation; Wikipedia: Palindrome; UC Santa Barbara: Kids These Days.
Related:
This poem is at least a decade old..
ReplyDelete