Instagram Eases Pain For Model and Poet
A crowd of 70 people squeezed into the Strand Bookstore at the Club Monaco in New York for a poetry reading by Yrsa Daley-Ward, the British model and writer.
Minutes before the program began in April, she sauntered into the room and plopped herself onto a love seat at the front.
“I think you need to hear a poem about mental health,” she said before launching into “mental health,” one of the most popular poems from her 2014 collection, “Bone,” which sold more than 20,000 copies.
When she finished, the room exploded in applause for Ms. Daley-Ward, who has comforted
A generation of writers building audiences online.
hundreds of thousands of fans with her cleareyed poetry on Instagram for the past five years. Ms. Daley-Ward, whose memoir, “The Terrible,” was published recently by Penguin Books, is part of a new generation of writers using social media to share their work, build a brand and find an audience.
The millennials who post short, visually pleasing work online are referred to as “Instagram poets.” They add images to their poems, taking photos of printed text or, in the case of Ms. Daley-Ward, filming their laptop screens as they write.
Unlike some of her peers, such as Rupi Kaur and Cleo Wade, Ms. Daley-Ward has also found critical success.
“I think in the context of Instagram poetry she is one of the more interesting poets,” said Chris McCabe, a librarian at the National Poetry Library in London. “She is much more textured and subtle.”
“The Terrible” is a devastating and lyrical account that begins with Ms. Daley-Ward’s childhood in Chorley, a small town in northern England where she was shuffled between her single mother and her religious grandparents.
Early chapters focus on her tense relationship with her mother, struggling with her sexuality and being raised as a Seventh- day Adventist. Most of the book focuses on her life after she turned 12, the age that marked the beginning of “the terrible” and “going under.” These are euphemisms for “depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, addiction,” she said.
She recounts how her first sexual experience at 14 worsened her depression (“You smell / different. There’s a weird scent / about you / some male odor. The man left his smell behind / all over you”). She writes about becoming a model and how the lifestyle drove her into a cycle of partying, drinking, sex and drugs.
“I was running from the cloak of depression,” she said.
She moved to South Africa, where she stumbled upon a poetry reading at Tagore’s, a jazz venue in Cape Town. “The Terrible” closes with this moment, which inspired her to pursue a writing career. “There is a magic about Cape Town, the mountains and the fog on the mountain and the blue sky,” she said, “something about it is very calming, it is very easy for me to write there.”
Her fans see her poems as a tool for healing, and they are drawn to her willingness to tackle difficult topics. “Many of her poems have that feeling, a sudden gasp of truth,” Florence Welch of the band Florence + The Machine wrote in an email.
When asked about being labeled an Instagram poet, Ms. Daley-Ward smiled.
“We are doing the poetry world a service,” she said. “I think it is a wonderful thing that poets are now sharing their work online because work gets into the hands of people of different identities and they feel like they have a voice.”