THE RISE OF INSTAGRAM POETRY

Let’s be frank, there are not many upsides to social media. We are well aware that the social media we consume is tantamount to mental junk food. Yet, while we mourn the loss of culture as we know it, one archaic art form is fighting back. Poetry is booming. There are a host of young poets whose work has found a home on Instagram, and this is translating to a resurgence in poetry’s popularity beyond the social media platform. Two years ago, Instagram poet Rupi Kaur’s book Milk and Honey became the biggest selling poetry book of all time, with 3.5-million sales, replacing Homer’s The Iliad. In the literary world, Instapoets get a bad rap. In the poetry journal PR Review, poet Rebecca Watts wrote a scathing indictment of Instagram poetry, titled “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”. In it, Watts ripped into the genre, describing Instapoetry as the “complete rejection of complexity, subtlety and eloquence. The reader is dead: long live consumer-driven content and the instant gratification this affords.” She argues that the number of followers a writer has does not attest to the quality of the work, but rather to the author’s ability to create accessible content. She went on to say that the literary community should “stop celebrating amateurism and ignorance”.

It’s not hard to argue with the hit and miss quality of Instapoetry, and there have been a host of social experiments conducted to illustrate how easy it is to amass followers without any real substantive content. Thom Young, a high school English teacher who amassed 50,000 followers on Instagram, did so by writing intentionally trite four-word “poems”. Similarly, Andrew Lloyd, a contributor to Vice magazine, parodied Instapoetry, amassing 1,000 followers in a month by writing the worst poetry he could. “I did everything I could to make these poems as bad as possible, and they were bad. It’s not like I’m some poetry prodigy who can’t help writing beautiful verses,” said Lloyd.

But despite what critics might say, there’s no denying that Instapoets are defining the genre for the millennial generation.