Poetry in motion
From Instapoets to YouTube bards, poetry moves up the popularity charts
Mahogany L. Browne’s first taste of internet fame came when her poem Black Girl Magic found its way to Facebook.
“You ain’t ’posed to get married. You ain’t ’posed to want no dream that big,” she spat in two-minute video. “You ain’t ’posed to dream at all.”
“I didn’t know what viral was until I went viral,” Browne says. “As a poet, I’d never experienced it.”
Poets, after all, pen chapbooks. They lecture at esteemed universities. They drop verses at poet stomping grounds such as New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Going viral is for drunken Eagles fans who face-plant into poles and little kids who try to lick TV news cameras.
But social media is upending what it means to consume poetry and what it means to create it. It has birthed a new cohort of bards known as “Instapoets” who share on Instagram tidy compositions that have the feel of literary selfies. And it has allowed writers of verse to reach a generation that grew up with Twitter, emoji and memes.
Lily Myers couldn’t understand why she was getting so many messages about her poem Shrinking Women, which she performed at a 2013 slam competition. “And then I saw it on Facebook,” she said. Today, it’s racked up more than five million views.
It’s as if social media is the defibrillator that has zapped the age-old art back to life, at a time that some feared it was becoming extinct. But if you think poetry was eager for the shock — well ...
“There was something about this that felt over the top touchy-feely ultra new age feministy,” a commenter groused beneath the YouTube video of Myers’ performance. (Commenters! One thing Robert Frost never had to deal with.)
“There’s a lot of negativity,” sighs Sam Cook, 34, a founder of Button Poetry, which specializes in spreading the gospel of poetry through YouTube. “Poetry has been such a niche space for so long, and the people in it feel like they ’re entitled to decide what is good and what is bad.”
“There are people,” Cook says, “that think it never should have gone to the internet.”
No one riles them up quite like Rupi Kaur, an Indian-Canadian poet who has emerged as the Sylvia Plath of Instagram. A couple of times a week, she posts one of her short, elegiac poems, illustrated by delicate line drawings, for more than two million followers.
The Torontonian has sold millions of copies of her books The Sun and her Flowers and Milk and Honey — which, even three years after its initial publication scored the No. 2 spot on Amazon’s bestseller list for last year, above J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Hillary Clinton’s What Happened.
There are others, such as Reuben Holmes, a self-proclaimed feminist poet who goes by the handle “r.h. Sin.” His bite-sized, prowomen works command a million followers on Instagram; his new book She Felt Like Feeling Nothing just landed on the New York Times paperback bestseller list at No. 15. There’s also Yung Pueblo, a New York poet whose May reading at Washington’s Busboys & Poets has sold out weeks in advance.
But if you look at the work of Browne, Myers, Kaur and others like them, it’s largely made by women — young women — for audiences of young women. The poems are highly personal messages of self-esteem and empowerment, deeply rooted in call-out culture — taking aim at abusers, bad boyfriends, and all the (generally, male), oppressors of the bedroom and boardroom.