Transcription
You put that [ __ ] on the internet and you're not a writer. You're a blogger, or you're an Insta journalist, or you're an Insta power, or you're a tweeter. Suddenly, that diminishes all sense of form of what you're doing. I think that if anyone had had the platform that we have now, they'd be doing exactly the same thing. I'm gonna take pride in being an Insta poet, and if that's what you want to do, [ __ ] doing because you can.
If journalists and critics are our gauge, poetry might be dead. Poets using social media, Insta poets, are swooping in and, in a matter of years, completely dismantling our understanding of poetry. Instagram poetry lacks depth and substance. Are our institutions destroying the art form or reviving it? This quiz is proof: Ruby Kaur writes bad poetry. It isn't a new sentiment. How many times has the internet or the damned Millennials using the internet killed something? Napkins, real estate, and now poetry.
There's backlash and pushback, and I think the reason for it is that suddenly poetry is popular again. Yeah, the first bestseller in English literature was a poet. It was Byron. He sold tons of copies. That kind of avant-garde poets, they hated that stuff. They thought it was too mainstream, middle-class, like traditional conventional values, so they rejected it. They couldn't get their badass poetry into those magazines, so they started their own magazines, which is awesome.
That's why self-publishing is exciting. When you can do something on your own, you can do it differently and better, reaching a massive audience and selling lots of copies. This is crazy. It hasn't happened in a century. Is Ruby Kaur the new Byron? It sounds like a crazy question, but perhaps it has some truth or similarity in it. She sold out a world tour. She has posters billboard size all over bookstores in North America, and she has sold 3.5 million copies of her collection.
I wanted to learn more about this. I wanted to learn more about the community, understand why we have this resistance to it, and to figure out if poetry is indeed dead or if it has somehow been made cool again. I decided to start by talking to a poet.
Filters make my eyes a little brighter, my teeth a little whiter, my skin a little clearer, and my hair accidentally a little greener. The contrast of the exposure is not one that's clearer. The definition of the portrait is one of a heavyweight photoshoper. VSCO, I feel pretty when I'm told I am. I feel petty when it's as cold as I'm a barefaced liar. Hashtag no filter. Filter a scared face. Beauty in disguise. Normal-looking human beings, but my profile picture has you surprised, as though it's an image I'd been dreaming.
The resemblance is close. My jawline is still mine, and my nose is still my nose. But would I still be of anyone's desire if I wasn't hidden behind Instagram's required mask? The mask of a fool, the mask of the 21st-century cruel world, or the mask of her self-conscious just trying to be cool? Does it matter? I still sit in pixelated, digitally deliberate, cowl into an aesthetic-looking ball until my anxiety as a candidate for Britain's next top face.
If I be intimidated, my idea of beauty was once so different. So why have I confined that wonder into an ugly 4x4 square of imprisonment, with parameters smaller than the size of my thighs and duller than the natural gradient of my eyes? I sit back so often with a chest-thudding sigh, scrolling, refreshing, relentless tapping, all down to an art, and think, since when did I ignore my own heart to hack at my own life? And since when did I become an image to sell of a millennial with scraps of sanity as its price?
Hello, my name is Tony Cox, and I'm a poet. Proof your boy is still mad. I can't really even looking at no crying. Congrats on this. Thank you. My first question for you is, why did you start posting poetry on Instagram?
I have always been surrounded by friends that have put their work online, whether that was music or videos or anything. You know, it was always such an obvious, natural thing that if they'd created something and they wanted to share it, they would put it on YouTube or write a blog post. Then one day, a friend said, "Look, you're writing all of this poetry. You love it. We all like it. Why didn't you put it on?" I was like, "No one's going to engage with it on Instagram. That seems like such a nuts thing." And I was completely wrong.
Every time I post something and I see someone like or comment or share it, that I know isn't, you know, isn't massively into books or has never been to a poetry show, it's like, "This is actually really cool that poetry is becoming cool again."
What is your process like? Do you write a poem specifically for Instagram? Instagram, for me, is purely a platform and a place to put it. I would never let that impede a creative process, or it's certainly nothing I've ever written or shared has been driven by the thought of Instagram. It just so happens that it's a nice place and a nice community to share it.
Oh yeah, I've never sat down and written a poem thinking, "This one will go down well online." Yeah, because then what's the point? Do you think that this could have happened if you hadn't started sharing your poetry online? Do you think that that was an important part of this project coming to fruition? Massively. I am not ashamed or embarrassed about that.
When the books that I read first said, "Oh, Charlie Cox, Lansdale with HBO HarperCollins," some of the reaction was quite astounding with, "Why? It's only because she's got an Instagram." Oh, it's numbers now that get book deals. The only way that I've tried to understand it is maybe, you know, is it taking something that is so precious and very steeped in academia and being really smart and really articulate and have people having studied English degrees and really getting to know their stuff is now being slowly pulled away from them by people like me? It's like, "Hi, I left school at 16." That's probably really frustrating.
I can understand that, but I don't think that that should be a slant on the work. How do you feel about the term "Instagram poet"? It just sends shivers down my spine. I'm not even doing that for dramatic effect. I feel so good collected in one sense. I am NOT embarrassed or ashamed that I post my work on Instagram or that through posting my work on Instagram, I have managed my dream of getting a book deal.
But I don't like what comes with the term "insta poet." Nobody ever says "insta poet" as though it's a good thing. It's a copy. Yeah, it's not a compliment. Which I don't know if I'm allowed to swear. Go for [ __ ]. Okay, it's a total [ __ ].
In previous years, you would never have degraded somebody's quality of work because of where they put it. Fine, it's novel, it's shiny, it's funny, it's comical that all those crazy kids at it again with the internet thinking they can be smart. Like, are we? We're not just doing exactly what you did but with a new tool forty years later.
It seemed to me that sharing poetry online wasn't a revolutionary act for Charlie. It was simply a logical move. If you create something, you post it online. In "The Dumbest Generation," Mark Bauerlein argues that young people have a brazen disregard for reading and books, and that isn't what I've noticed.
What I've seen in my conversations is that they're reading, but in a very different way. Maybe in a way that we don't yet consider reading. Possibly, yes. People are not sitting down to read a poetry collection, but maybe they're finding their poetry while scrolling on Instagram. After all, Ruby Kaur's 2.8 million Instagram followers didn't press follow to not read her poetry.
Poetry comes in many forms, and in the same way that literature is popular, you can have Dan Brown and then you can have literary fiction. Why not? Kirsty Melville, president of Andrews McMeel Publishing, the publisher that first published "Milk and Honey" and has since published so many Instagram poets, makes a really interesting point.
With novels, I think we've come to understand that there is popular fiction and literary fiction, and obviously there are blurred lines. But we are okay and happy with these two arenas. But with poetry, maybe it's felt that there's only been a literary poet scene, and maybe there's some resistance and pushback because of where those popular poets have come from.
Many seem to take issue not only with how the poetry is being consumed but with the type of poetry. Rebecca Watts, writing for PN Review, a well-established poetry journal, wrote a piece titled "The Cult of the Noble Amateur," in which she argues that these poets are ruining poetry and it's simply a commercial enterprise. She chose as her main example Holly McNish, author of five books, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, and a poet who happens to post her stuff online.
When I reached out to Rebecca about being in this documentary, she said she'd felt she'd said everything she needed to. So I sat down with Holly to talk about what was written in that piece. I was supposed to be reviewing Holly's new collection, but to do so for a poetry journal would imply that it deserves to be taken seriously as poetry.
McNish, a slapdash assembly of words, celebrates the complete stagnation of the poet's mind. I'm Holly McNish, and I work as a writer and a poet. Why is the poetry world pretending that poetry is not an art form? I refer to the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their honesty and accessibility—buzzwords for the open integration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterizes their work.
The short answer is that art less poetry sells. I can see that sort of resentment of the idea of people sort of jumping on this art form in order to get followers, and maybe there are some people that are doing that. But I mean, that's always been the case in art. If Shakespeare was around today, I'm pretty sure he'd be putting updates about all his plays that were on Instagram or Twitter.
Robert Burns would have probably been posting up his love sonnets, probably tagging girls he wanted to meet up with on Instagram. I don't think a lot of the poets that we look at in a certain way wouldn't be using these platforms. And I keep putting them up there just because I think it's just as nice a way to share your work.
This idea that just because you then put them in a certain space rather than sending it to a publisher or a more literary magazine then deems it something that you haven't spent time doing. Just because somebody finds poetry that they enjoy on Instagram and then follows someone, maybe in order to get updated with the poem every day, that makes them a follower rather than a reader.
Even though they're still reading poetry in the way that they would read if they had gone to a bookshop and bought a book. Cultural commentators are pandering to a strain of inverse snobbery that considers talent to be undemocratic. In acting, thus, they are playing a part in the establishment's muddle-headed conspiracy to democratize poetry.
Poetry that's published in a book is maybe more likely to have been worked on, more likely you've had an editor, more likely there's been other people look at it. I'm still pretty sure it's probably easier to get published if you come from a wealthy background and can dedicate a lot of time to it.
No, people in the publishing world, I don't think it's that anyone has a problem with us [ __ ] poets sharing stuff online. I think it's because now publishers that they deem a certain type or standard of poetry have now published books with, I guess, poets who have been seen as not of that type or not that standard.
Yes, yes, I just think there's space for it all. The new poets are products of a cult of personality, which demands from its heroes only that they be honest and accessible. As McNish understands, the cult of personality that social media fosters works precisely this way. Once you care about the person, you'll consume anything they produce, especially if it makes you feel better about your own lack of talent.
It's not like I've quickly written something in order to put it online, enjoying it, likes. If I was going to do that, I'd hold a cat up to the screen or something. She's gonna kind of see more than that of you just instantly want anyway, a bit of fame online.
I can understand why they group us together, but I just think it shows probably that they maybe haven't read well, actually know a lot about any of the artists. It's the grand poet's really. I just find it funny that I've been called an Instagram poet. I've been called a YouTube poet, but I've never been called a book poet, despite having five of them spanning about a thousand pages published.
But maybe about a poet, then I don't care really. Holly points out an important tension between medium and credibility. Where we post something and how seriously it's therefore taken. Why is the term "insta poet" if not to differentiate from "book poet"? And what therefore is a "book poet"?
What is it about posting poetry on Instagram that makes it different? So if you want to be taken seriously as a literary writer, yeah, it's done happen online. It's changing, but very slowly. But still, like among serious literary journals, there is a distinct hierarchy between print and digital. It's like, "Oh, I got into the digital edition of this famous journal." That's good, but it's not as good as getting into the print version.
Pauling and Charlie both point out that social media allowed them to enter an arena they didn't feel privy to before—an area that felt academic and literary and uninviting. So I sat down with an academic, Johanna Drucker of UCLA, to ask her why academia might be having this pushback.
The issue here is the snobbery of the poetry police. It's like Bethel poetry. Well, it says like, "Yes, it's a side." Like, what is there, like a statue someplace that you have to, you know, like a legal definition of what poetry means? It has to belong to some modern esoteric avant-garde.
I think the issue with Ruby Kaur is that people in the Academy are really annoyed that their authority has no purchase in the popular world. And guess what? It doesn't. Nobody cares. You know, people who care about what academics say are other academics.
The anxiety of the Academy on losing, you know, more and more of its sort of market share, I think it's obvious, and that's a bigger cultural problem. A study released by the Poetry Foundation found that it was pretty split down the middle of people who were college-educated and weren't college-educated who read poetry.
Therefore, my theory is that it isn't simply that academics and literary folk are reading poetry, but that they're the ones owning the conversation around it. They're the ones writing about poetry, the ones writing reviews about poetry, and suddenly that's been blown wide open. There is a large, passionate, and public conversation happening currently online, completely separate from academia.
In "Kids These Days," Malcolm Harris points out that in America, teenagers have better access to the Internet than adults can read. Therefore, how could we not have imagined that their relationship to how people read poetry wouldn't change?
It is an all backlash. There are many people who are on board with this new movement, including Kirsty Melville, who is actively and excitingly publishing these books. As the world has changed, I'm constantly thinking about where two-bit books fit in people's lives and how do they interact.
I don't think it's an either/or world, and I think that a lot of the poets who are on Instagram see themselves as writers, and Instagram as a platform for them, as opposed to them being Insta poets. There's a sort of elitism to do with it, but it's mostly, I think, to do with the fact that there's a new generation that's coming along to challenge the old.
And that's always, there's always tension with that. Whenever there's a new art form, the dominant orthodoxy of the day will be critical of the new art form. So I think that that's part of what's going on as well, and that's a natural dynamic that happens whenever you have change, you know, in a medium.
There's clearly a shift happening, and I think one of the largest factors is the amount of people that now have access to poetry and have access to sharing poetry. In a theory of mass culture, the text brings up the idea of Gresham's law of culture—the concept that if culture isn't protected, it will be destroyed.
The essay was written in the 50s. This is not a new concept. Anxiety over what happens when the masses are introduced to an art form or any other cultural outlet is not a new feeling. I think the real opportunity comes in how we respond to that fear and ask questions about why do we feel resistant to this type of poetry? Why do we have backlash towards it?
In "Highbrow Lowbrow," Lawrence Levine discusses the concept that there's been a long-held idea that some people can recognize culture and others cannot, and that the young and inexperienced cannot be creators of culture. The most recent poetry conference that I attended only had one panelist mention Ruby Kaur throughout the entire weekend, even though the year that "Milk and Honey" was released, poetry sales went up 79 percent in Canada.
I do not feel that this movement, whether we like it or not, agree with it or disagree with it, is something that we can ignore. I'd argue that much of the resistance comes from a genuine place of caring—that people that love poetry are concerned about what might be happening to it, that it might be changing.
And so here I am to confirm it's changing, but that might not be a bad thing. Regardless of whether you like the poetry or the poets, one thing that is undoubtedly different is the platform. Instagram was launched in 2010. It's now owned by Facebook and it has over a billion users.
To understand this movement, it is vital to understand the platform, to see how it's affecting the poetry, affecting creativity, affecting the readers. So I sat down with poet Opilio Saleh to understand how Instagram was affecting her poetry.
"Can't I just be a black woman that loves herself in peace without having to explain why my skin, be it honey or molasses, is a dream? When my hair, coarse or sleek, is a crown? Can't I just be a black woman that loves being a black woman without having to be sorry or humble or polite about it? Damn it! Who else has to justify loving themselves like this? Who else has to fight for the right to call themselves a blessing? Goodness! Can't I just be a black woman that loves herself in peace?"
My name is Opilio Saleh. I'm from Malawi. I was born and raised in Malawi, and then I moved around to New Mexico, Baltimore, and then Oxford, where I'm studying a Master's of Science in medical anthropology.
Currently, you have a really beautiful theme. You post a poem and then a photo of yourself, and then a poem and a photo of yourself back and forth. How did you decide on that theme, but also how is the process of that?
I decided that I wanted to keep my page really personal, and in that sense, you can tell who was writing the poetry, where I can tell who it's about, and you can see parts of my life. I got this message one time. This girl was like, "The poems are not raw enough. I want to know what happened at the end. I want to know this." And I was like, "You're missing the point. It's about you. It's not about me."
Like, it's not about me all the time sharing things. It's weird. Yes, people will get a sense of who I am, what I've been through, but I'll always have more story left. Why did you decide to make a physical collection if your poetry was working so well online?
'Cause I love books. Yeah, I'm a poet who happens to share my work on Instagram. I'm taking advantage of social media and the platform that it's given us. In this time of social media, just from looking at my direct messages right now, I'm seeing or hearing of other poets who positively changed people's lives.
I think that Instagram poetry is important. You know, it's changing people's lives in every which way, and though it might have been two lines, three lines, four lines, it changed it. Like, it made them think otherwise. And so if old poetry is not having that same effect on people, then why should the literary community not find a way to embrace poets like myself?
You know, and this is why we have to go off and do a lot of self-publishing, because traditional publishers don't seem to know where to fit us. How do you feel about the term "Instagram poet" or "insta poet" that is often used?
I definitely embrace it. I mean, when I talk to people, I'm like, "Whoa, what? Okay, you know, maybe I can convince you to buy my book. Look at my social media right now. All the way you can follow me right now, and then you can get a sense of who I am and what I'm feeling." I don't think I get offended by the term. I am proud of my community.
Ruby Kaur was very aware and very transparent, like all the poets I have talked to, about the fact that Instagram is simply a platform for what they're doing. I wanted to better understand some of the statistics and ideologies we have around social media, so I sat down with Katherine Ormerod, author of "Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life," to better understand how this platform might be affecting the poetry.
My name is Katherine Ormerod, and I'm an author, a journalist, and an influencer. If that is your device that you're carrying around with you at all times, obviously it's going to influence the way you consume all forms of media, all forms of art, basically all forms of culture.
The fewer followers you have, obviously the less relevant in the ecosystem your work is, and that's a really rational, understandable, you know, basic marketing conversation. The second level is probably the more problematic side of it, but obviously it's the way that you emotionally feel about being popular, about being validated by those that like and follow you.
That might potentially have an impact on the way that you create, in the way that you want to feed the followers rather than, you know, if you only got validated when you had a big exhibition. See, if every single day you're getting those hits of dopamine when you get that validation and that makes you feel good, what kind of an impact is that going to have on your creative process?
Whistleblowers more and more are telling us that the creators were super aware of the fact that this was a way to really make us be addicted and to kind of hack our brains to make us feel really good about ourselves for a second, and then this little, you know, plummet in esteem, and keep us coming back and back for more. We've all been guinea pigs for the past five years.
Now we're starting to realize that there are things that we need to be careful about, and that if we want to be able to really maximize on the good that's out there, we have to be really aware of the bad as well. We don't like the relationship between art and commerce, and you know, we never have. That's meant to be a penniless artiste, you know, sitting in their garret, only finding success now untimely death from tuberculosis.
By having this strong brand as an individual, it negates that anonymity and against that idea that you're not making any money from your work. I think even though, you know, a poet might be making money from themselves as a poet rather than necessarily selling their work, somehow that's all bound in on one kind of feeling about it—that it's art for money, it's poetry for pounds.
You know, it's very easy to look back on it and be like, "How if I spent the past three hours in this superficial circus of nothingness? What have I gained from this? Absolutely nothing except for, you know, a few lashes of self-loathing." Anything that makes you think or question or take that moment to truly engage is amazingly positive, and that is what art can do on social media.
As Kathryn points out, we have so many preconceived notions and ideas and well-researched statistics and facts about how social media affects what we see on social media and affects us after we have spent time there. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin talks about this concept of traditional context—how much the surrounding environment affects what we're looking at and what we create.
I think that that is crucial here. The way that you create a poem, if you think that someone's going to sit down with a book and read it, it's going to be different than the way you write a poem if all you know is that they're going to be scrolling through a photography-based app to see it.
I think there's a point at which too much distribution actually changes the nature of art. And I think that kind of creative freedom that goes with DIY art, I actually think it makes more sense if you can, you have a sense that you can control your audience a little bit. You're not just writing for everyone.
Adam brings up another important layer of complexity that Benjamin is also concerned with—the ways that the context is further changed. You are making something in a mass sense. If something can be reproduced on Instagram endlessly, that may completely remove that kind of context.
I think that this might be one of the main reasons, even unconsciously, that poetry on Instagram is so short. Sure, it has to be short to physically fit in that space of a photograph, but maybe it needs to be short so that it can work in almost any context.
As a creator on Instagram, you have literally no control over the context of your image. You have no idea who is going to look at it, where they will be standing or sitting when they look at it, and you won't even get to choose what image is shown above or below it on someone's feed because that decision is made by Instagram.
How do you write poetry for the platform? Talking with many of the poets, the way to get past this is to not write for the platform. It's to write your poetry the way that you would write it and share it on Instagram and hope for the best.
Such as it's consumable, it's conceived and executed within the frameworks of consumption. That's a really different thing. Most poets in our universe think to know what's expected and to package what you're doing to fit what's already the defined space. That's part of what's going on there.
Let's talk about the algorithm. Any Instagram user knows that the algorithm is an elusive and mysterious force that, obviously, because of the sheer amount of content, Instagram cannot be curated or run by humans. Therefore, a computer is making a series of decisions to show you what it thinks you will most enjoy.
If you're a poet, then how can you appease that algorithm to ensure that your stuff shows up and is shared? Posting more often, posting things that catch people's attention—these sorts of things are how you make the algorithm happy. But what happens to writing when you're trying to satisfy an algorithm as opposed to satisfy readers?
Now, I don't think that's what poets are doing, but I think that it's a part of the platform and therefore must be considered. The platform affects the poetry, no doubt about it. But I do think that there is a mistake in assuming that because you post on Instagram, all of the poetry is going to be the same.
Apart from posting on Instagram, many of the similarities fizzle out. Some people post images of themselves alongside their poetry, but some remain completely anonymous. Some post poems sporadically, incorporate illustration, who incorporate visual art, who incorporate photography. The themes all change, the personalities all change.
We have accepted that an author is simply someone who writes. They can be a romance author or a crime writer, but at the core, they're an author. Why then must we label poets on Instagram as Insta poets? In Rebecca Watts' article, she argued that like the president, these new poets have a cult of personality.
There is some truth to that. I disagree that being a personality or a brand inherently detracts from your poetry, but it is true that Instagram allows for a type of small celebrity. However, I think that there's a deeper and more important similarity, shockingly, to the new president that can be taken into account.
You know, Ruby Kaur is the devil and benign, you know, sort of an example of a phenomenon that we have in the most sociopathic, illogical form in our current government. Because we have the tweet president, and that is truly dangerous and truly destabilizing and really terrifying because there is no constraint between the thumbs, the screaming, and the broadcast.
So, you know, give me a rubric or any today. If social media has the power to impact presidential elections, why would we think that it wouldn't impact poetry? The impact that social media is having on poetry may very well be inevitable if it's happening in every aspect of our lives too.
A bridge into the city, horoscopes say the same thing. I think about the world in the bath sky, so miserable. New Yorkers are crying for 5:30 p.m. This murky water, all these weird us, if he's on my shoulder. Should I be like Jack Gilbert with Frank O'Hara, with a touch of Ruby Kaur for relatability, but make it specific to you?
This is what they're telling me. Somewhat cut tongues and fingers from picking up my almost book and inhaling the words. Some say take your time. What I know is that in this book, there's too much talk about pretty, drunk, creasy, illuminated boy, dreamy oak floors, and brick walls.
So I'm really curious what you think of this term "Instagram poet" or "insta poet." I think there's a lot of negative connotations attached to an Instagram poet, but I post a lot of different things. I'm not just posting, not just like pulling one photo upon. I'm very, like, spreading.
So I feel like it works for me, and I don't really think anything negative about that. I like that term. I think so. Why would you like it? Why do you think it works? It's kind of weird, but it makes me think of, like, how would Bukowski use Instagram?
Like, ask you, how would I mock themselves? You just posted this collection, and I'm really curious, why make it physical? Right? Oh my god, if you are posting your poetry online, you're posting it onto Instagram. People are murmuring it, they're responding to it, they're double-tapping it, right? You're getting that feedback.
How would you feel if your poetry was only digital? Like, is it so important to have it solid? Yeah, yeah. Like, I'd love to just, like, I’m someone who always carried that book around with me everywhere I go. Like, maybe two books to a party, to a club, whatever.
And so I feel like it's really important to have something that's solid. Yeah, I would neither. Like, I've been struggling with because I'm like, "Oh, can you please do a paid version?" I'm like, "I don't know why." But yeah, I think it's so important because I love, you know, writing in the margins and literally putting sticky notes in it.
And like, yeah, I mean, I kind of attack all my books. You decided to go completely your own way. Yeah, you put this together. I'm guessing you made the cover? Yeah, right. You did everything. You've decided on the order, you decided the ending.
Was it like, "I bet," but you could have tried a traditional route? I mean, I was so close to signing with a traditional publishing agency. The thing is, like, I don't really think my audience cares where the book comes from. They simply want a book of her poetry in mass authorship.
And the rise of self-publishing, Timothy Laquinta discusses the importance that publishing has had over authorial identity—how writers feel, in many cases, that they become legitimate writers and authors when they are traditionally published through a publishing house or a press.
Obviously, self-publishing has been happening for millennia, but there's definitely a new feeling when you have a well-established audience enough on a platform such as Instagram that you don't need the validation anymore. That you feel the validation is simply in presenting the object to your followers that will then happily buy and read it.
In an interview with PBS, Ruby Kaur said, "Does it hurt you when the poetry is being critiqued as more, you know, therapeutic or more, you know, emotional rather than real poetry?" You know, not really. And it's because I never really intend to get into the literary world. This is actually not for you.
This is for that, like, 17-year-old brown woman in Branson. Obviously, Ruby Kaur doesn't speak for all of Instagram poetry, but I think what she says here can maybe give us a hint of what this community is doing. If she's saying my writing is not trying to be the serious, like, fancy type of literature, but it's just poetry that is non-literary, that is insane and amazing and exciting because that has not existed for like a hundred years.
There has been no non-literary poetry that people actually read and consume. She says this isn't for you. There is a question of who that "you" specifically is, but I think more importantly, the question is, well then, who are you writing for?
And I think she's writing for people like herself—women, young women, women of color—people who, if we're honest, poetry hasn't specifically been for in the past. I think measures of proper art have been based for hundreds and hundreds of years, well, in the UK especially, on a kind of privileged white, straight, able-bodied.
My own writing, I didn't have to march around X amount of publishing houses and meet inevitably old white men who aren't interested in me or my work and present it to them that way. One of my takeaways from Instagram poetry is that it's probably not directed towards me as an audience, and I think that's probably one of the cool things about it.
Yeah, like poetry is in a really horrible state, and it has been for a long time. No one reads it. It's like very sad. So the fact—and it's because it's directed towards people like me—that is so sad. When I speak about going into a space and making it yours, I think that's what women of color are doing. That's what queer writers are doing on Instagram.
It is truly like breaking down doors and saying we are here, and our work is powerful, and it means something to a lot of other people. In "Women and Power," Mary Beard argues that you cannot easily fit women into a structure that is coded as male. You have to change the structure.
I see this Instagram movement as a restructuring, or at the bare minimum, a new structuring, a separate structure. I cannot get through this conversation without mentioning that the majority of Instagram users are women, and that the vast majority of participants in the Instagram poetry community are also women.
I think that this restructuring has had an impact outside of just Instagram. When I asked Kirsty Melville what she looked for in a new poet, she said, "Looking at the quality of the writing and what the message is that the writer is trying to say on Instagram, and then I'm also looking at the engagement—whether people are interested in what the poet has to say and how many people are responding or commenting.
And then I look to see whether other people refer to the work. So I sort of look in different places to see how popular someone is and what the message is and whether that fits with what's going on in the cultural moment." Impact and reach, emotional resonance and popularity—these are the things that Kirsty mentioned.
She didn't mention literary merit. Some critics might frown or cringe at that, but I think that if this is a restructuring, this ecosystem is simply looking for different attributes. Kirsty is a champion of this movement. She's pushing forward. She's actively celebrating the community.
So I wanted to also talk to a more traditional publishing press, and I reached out to Faber and Faber. I was able to talk with Hannah Marsh, head of marketing for poetry. My name is Hannah Marshall, and I work in the marketing department at Faber and Faber.
Without question, we basically only had very few avenues for sort of promoting our poetry books. Poetry has specialist presses, but they don't have much review space for sure. The platforms that you can use are really well designed for poetry—not that they are designed for poetry, but they just happen to be.
Hannah also told me that Faber launched a new poetry podcast earlier in 2018. I don't think that this is a coincidence. I think that the enthusiasm of the Instagram poetry community has spilled into other arenas online and has allowed for a poetry podcast to thrive.
She also told me about the high attendance at poetry events. I definitely feel like that all these really cool poetry events going on, not just in London, like all over the UK, and that there's just a really exciting buzz to these events. They're quite often packed out. You know, the crowd is really diverse. It'll have young audience members, older audience members, and they're really, really exciting things.
So I feel like events are as important, if not more important, than they ever be. When I saw Ruby Kaur perform here in Ottawa in late 2017, she had sold out an entire museum. But not only that, she had sold it out to mainly young women—young women who were so enthusiastic about her poetry that they were screaming throughout the entire show, responding to her poetry that wasn't about rape, trauma, being a woman of color, self-empowerment, and feminism.
Critic Lindsay Ellis explains this phenomenon through "Twilight." That yes, "Twilight" has problematic elements, but that one of the main reasons we've had so much vitriol against it is that we love to hate what teenage girls enjoy. We see their interests and tastes as petty, vain, and unworthy of seriousness.
I think that this is a huge reason why Instagram poetry has such a backlash and that we don't want to take it seriously because it is for and by young women. For the last year, any time I have walked into a bookshop, I have seen a table full of poetry right at the entrance.
And I always think two things. The first is that this happened because of young women, and the second is that on that table, there is often also Ginsberg, Plath, or Yeats. This, whether you like it or not, is a part of poetic history. One of my favorite things is to see Ruby sitting next to John Keats and on "The Odyssey."
A lot of us grew up reading it and loving it, learning from it, and I don't see why that can't be a double-sided relationship. Laughing, AHA, the role of Elizabeth Fisher Gilbert, Charles Bukowski. My favorite poem is called "Wild Goose" by Mary Oliver, which was kind of the reason I started writing poetry, actually.
So Pablo Neruda, Sandra Cisneros, I definitely love the Asha daily word. There's Kulikov, Fatuma. I also love Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds. Any time you share something of Sylvia Plath's, it's just a case mega. People love the work, you know? It's a huge connection there with readers.
Perhaps Instagram poetry is also functioning as a gateway. Matthew Zapruder, in "Why Poetry," explains that poetry has for a long time had the reputation of requiring more education or special training to understand and is therefore not attracted a lot of people. Maybe this is changing.
I would argue that probably many of these readers are enjoying this poetry and then going to a bookstore or library to find more and accidentally finding TS Eliot. The question is no longer if this is poetry or if this is good poetry, but how this changes our perception of all the poetry that has come before it.