Verse goes viral

Instagram poets shake up literary establishment

They’re byte-sized doses of poetry — a few lines of verse in a fauxretro font, crafted to fit into your Instagram feed.

A burgeoning cohort of bards known as Instapoets are bringing a viral sensibility to the ageold literary tradition, achieving a level of popularity some observers say could displace poetry from the rarefied domain of cultural tastemakers, and push it into the mainstream.

The rise of this new digital genre has been hotly contested in poetry circles. Proponents credit the social media movement with introducing new audiences to the pleasures of poetry, while critics argue algorithm-friendly compositions are watering down the medium.

But many Instapoets say they ’re less interested in an imprimatur of prestige than winning the digital hearts of readers, and numbers suggest that strategy has paid off in print sales.

Canadian vendors sold 154 per cent more print units in the poetry category between 2016 and 2017, according to industry organization BookNet Canada, and eight of the 10 top-selling titles last year were written by poets who gained prominence by sharing their work on Instagram.

Toronto-based Instagram sensation Rupi Kaur said that, before her first two poetry collections became best-selling hits, she felt like there wasn’t room for her work in Canada’s literary establishment. Kaur said Instagram allowed her to build her own readership, which includes roughly 2.7 million followers.

Even for those without Instagram accounts, like poet and Brock University professor Gregory Betts, the emergence of poetic superstars on social media has been hard to ignore.

Betts, who specializes in avantgarde literature, said most students walk into his classroom with little knowledge of Canada’s poetic pantheon, but every one of them could name Kaur. For some, he said, she’s what brought them to the course.

However, he said many of his more traditional colleagues dismiss Kaur’s work for the same reasons his students embrace it — her poems are accessible to a broad audience.

Poetry has long been thought of as language at its most refined, he said, but Kaur’s pithy verse is colloquial, invoking universal imagery like stars and flowers, and it doesn’t take too much work to decipher her meaning.

For example, a recent one-line Instapoem reads: “you break women in like shoes.” It has been liked more than 160,000 times.

“Part of the traditional complaints against her is that she’s dumbing down poetry, but that’s because we’re misreading her,” Betts said. “Her strength and her innovation is not at the level of the content. It’s at the level of the medium.”

He said Kaur falls into a great literary tradition — extending back to Dante — of poets who were widely criticized for using the vernacular of their time.

When the language shifts, he said, poetry shifts as well, threatening to break up the “elite fiefdom” of the literary upper crust.