Since Sunday, a 25-year-old Portland poet has been savaged online for his typewritten poetry, often Instagrammed with cigarettes, as an archetypical entitled white male poet. But the man, Collin Yost, says the viral tweet mocking his work is not only hurtful, it's wrong.

The saga of the Instagram poetry and a viral tweet began when another 25-year-old Portland poet and digital artist, Izzy Leslie, was browsing in the small press section of Powell's Books.

"His book was one of the featured small press poetry books so I took a look at it and just was kind of in disbelief how corny and misogynistic his poetry was," Leslie said over Twitter message on Tuesday, "I wrote his name down and checked out his instagram later and screenshotted some of his posts and made a tweet."

Leslie was surprised by the success of her tweet, which collected several screenshots from Yost's Instagram and said, simply, "this guy is a PUBLISHED author."

this guy is a PUBLISHED author pic.twitter.com/aqxif0N9Xk — izzy leslie (@badplantmom) August 28, 2017

While the tweet is technically true, there is a bit of nuance here: Yost's book -- "A Shot of Whiskey and a Kiss You'll Regret in the Morning" -- is self-published.

Still, something about the tweet resonated with the internet.

"I had no idea how popular it would get!" Leslie said. "No one ever retweets me."

The retweets and comments rolled in.

"Hemingway $ Bukowski need to be burning in hell for making boring white dudes think anyone should care about their faux-edginess," wrote @ellle_em.

"His poems are a trainwreck I keep returning to," said @hegemonster.

"Hello my talented fic writing fannibal fam," wrote @allegralovelace. "Whenever you doubt yourselves, please remember this guy is a published author."

As of Tuesday afternoon, the tweet had 3,158 retweets, 13,697 likes and 603 comments. Willamette Week wrote about it with the headline "Everybody Hates Portland's Cigarette Bro-Poet."

For Yost, the hate was heartbreaking.

"I am getting shredded out there for doing something I love that people relate to," Yost said over Facebook messenger on Tuesday. "It's tough. The internet is incredibly mean place at times."

He stayed home from work Tuesday, trying to deal with the fallout.

"If someone didn't like my writing they could just not have read it, or left a message to me personally. Now I am being attacked and played out to be this typical bro-male and I'm not," he said. "It's just been a really hurtful 24 hours."

"I pay my own rent, own car payment," Yost added. "I work as a scientist to recover endangered species. Everyone just wants to label me while telling everyone else that you shouldn't label people."

Yost and Leslie have not been in contact with each other, but when asked what she would say to Yost, knowing he found the tweet hurtful, Leslie said, "Well, I was just expressing my opinion and part of putting your work out there is being critiqued."

"Maybe Collin can take this critique as an opportunity to look inward and grow as an artist and a person," she added.

She added that Yost had liked a comment someone made on his Facebook page referring to her as a "Portland whore."

"Dude is a woman hater and I don't waste sleep on the opinions of misogynists," Leslie said.

For Yost, who said he's only been writing poetry for about two years, the backlash is baffling.

"So many of these people sending me hate are the same ones preaching love and tolerance," he said. "I just don't understand."

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052

lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker