A hazy image shows a young couple kissing on a warm summer night. The Eiffel Tower glows in the background. Overlaid is the handwritten scribble, “An open window in Paris is all the world I need”. This is the work of Atticus, a Canadian poet who has become one of the leading so-called ‘Instapoets’. 

The Rise of the Instapoets

The Instapoets publish their brief verses on the social media platform Instagram. They favor fonts imitating handwriting or typewriters, often overlaid on images fantasizing youth, freedom, escape and travel. Their poems are short and aesthetically pleasing, key characteristics to make them social media friendly. This essay, posted by TKBR Publishing, describes Instapoetry as “an adaptation of traditional poetic ideals into a transformative Internet subgenre.”

By using the platform Instagram, many previously unknown poets at the beginning of their careers have skyrocketed to fame. Rupi Kaur is one such example. After gaining millions of followers on Instagram, she has now had two collections including Milk and Honey at the top of Amazon’s poetry bestselling list. Amanda Lovelace, an American poet, also catapulted to fame after publishing verses on Tumblr and later Instagram. Her book, the princess saves herself in this one, won a Goodreads Choice Award. 

Potentially, as a result of the growing interest in Instapoetry, the popularity of poetry is booming off social media too. In the UK in 2018, sales of poetry books broke records with a total of 1.3 million volumes of poetry sold. Teenagers and millennials made up the majority of the buyers. While Kaur’s Milk and Honey became the no.1 bestseller, collections by Leonard Cohen, Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy saw increased sales too.

Instapoetry Leaves Critics Divided

The byte-sized verses of Instapoetry have been lauded and scorned in equal measure. Fans have hailed poems such as those of Kaur for their treatment of hard-hitting topics like substance abuse, racism and sexual assault. In particular, Instapoetry appeals to today’s youth generation by exploring challenging subjects like these in a manner unpretentious and immediate.

For example, Kaur recently posted a poem that reads: “no one on this planet/is in more denial/than the white man/who regardless of all/the evidence in front of him/still thinks racism and sexism/and all the world’s pain don’t exist”. 

Lovelace’s work often focuses on sexual abuse, trauma, and healing. One of her recently published Instapoems reads: “her depression/makes her anxious/&/her anxiety/makes her depressed./—never-ending.”

A Superficial Marketing Ploy?

The medium has drawn criticism, however, from those who see the succinct lines as shallow and negating the long creative process behind poetry.  As Vinu Casper laments, “Poets who spend years honing their craft, carefully writing and rewriting every line, practicing their performance over and over before they take to stage, are being beaten to the punch by influencers with a steady social media presence and masses of followers. These so-called Instapoets get away with blanket statements and empty metaphors under the guise of poetry.”

Critics also say this new genre of poetry is merely an attempt to gain followers or even a marketing ploy. As E. Ce Miller writes, “Their work has been called contrived, reductive, formulaic, shallow, lacking in both form and content, transient and trivial, low-brow and cliché. They’ve been accused of everything from unoriginality to blatant plagiarism; critiqued for their accessibility, sharability, and marketability.”

Texas-based poet Thom Young even decided to conduct an experiment on Instagram to try to demonstrate the superficiality of the Instapoetry trend. “I decided that a parody or satire was needed to demonstrate how easy it was to get popular on social media, particularly on Instagram, writing this short, trite poetry,” he told PBS. “And right away I started getting followers and likes like crazy.” His followers also apparently shot up from 9,000 to 46,000 in under a year. Young suggested that simplistic poetry like this was gaining so much attention because it requires little critical thinking. 

Instapoetry as a Force for Change 

However, Instapoetry is a relatively recent trend. The jury is therefore still out on whether it will make history like other radical movements like the beat poets. In fact, the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who helped spark San Francisco’s beat movement, saw new forms of poetry as a powerful tool for social change. He said, “We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.” 

Social media is certainly, for the most part, a vacuous, superficial space. It contributes significantly to the image-driven culture of modern society. But small socio-political movements are flourishing and taking advantage of the vast audience of platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, for example, Black Lives Matter activists harnessed social media for protest.

Perhaps Instapoetry will never get beyond a few shallow words in an aesthetic font. On the other hand, maybe it will become Ferlinghetti’s force for change for younger generations.