Dutch writer Else Boer reads various poets on Instagram and TikTok. In this essay, she explores how to read their work and what the medium says about the message.
Around 2016, when Instagram still consisted mostly of photos of coffee and duck face selfies, poems started appearing on my feed. I was intrigued. Poetry always seemed a bit complex to me. As a student of Dutch language and literature I felt intimidated by the hermetically sealed texts I had to analyse. I had decided that poetry maybe wasn’t for me.
But now I saw poems that were, well… easy. On the toilet, I scrolled past texts like ‘where you are. / is not who you are. / – circumstances’; ‘speak only good things into existence’; or, from the most famous online poet: ‘our backs / tell stories / no books have / the spine to / carry / women of colour.’
The way I read the texts was, to put it mildly, rather ambivalent. There was no need to feel intimidated, and I loved that. At the same time, my eyes almost rolled out of my head at the clichés being served: love yourself, accept your flaws, speak your truth. However, despite my scepticism, I did find some of the poems quite beautiful, even inspiring. Because yes, I did want to accept my flaws and worry less about unimportant things. A reminder of that was not unpleasant, especially when it was eloquently worded.
I’m not the only one who thinks so. Rupi Kaur’s self-published collection Milk and Honey sold over a million copies in the first year it was published. Instagram poets are not only famous on Instagram, most have published best-selling poetry collections through traditional channels. And another platform, TikTok, has given poets even more options to express themselves, with the hashtag #poetry pointing to over 22 million posts. Maybe online poetry is simply a new genre that readers should embrace. After all, these platforms are doing what most literary journals have failed to do for decades: get young people exited about reading and writing poetry. So what is the literary value of so-called Instapoetry?
#Poem
The first perk of online poetry is its accessibility. There is no need to go to a bookstore, browse through dozens of books and then buy one that ultimately might not appeal to you. With online platforms, you can read a few poems and the algorithm will give you more of what you enjoy. The reason I started seeing more and more poetry was because I engaged with it: I read it, liked or saved it, and the algorithm served me more poets that I otherwise would not have learnt about.
Instagram and TikTok have another advantage over traditional publishing. They democratise poetry: anyone can post a poem. What is considered valuable is no longer decided by editors, but by the readers themselves. An unknown poet can have thousands of followers on Instagram. This inclusivity brings more diversity to poetry: a striking number of famous online poets are women of colour – a group that hasn’t played a major role in traditional publishing.
The reason so many people engage with poetry on Instagram and TikTok has little to do with innovative vocabulary or surprising poetic form – things that were always emphasised during my Dutch literature studies. Instead, the poems are read for their relatability. The language is extremely simple. The form is mostly defined by line breaks and poets sometimes use cursive to emphasise their point.
What strikes me as I scroll through the poems is that they often express a ‘truth’ the author has discovered. This is confirmed in the comments, which range from ‘beautiful’ to ‘this is me’ or ‘needed this reminder.’ The value of Instagram poetry does not lie in poetic innovation, but in articulating the author’s personal discoveries and insights that resonate with the readers.
The key ingredients of a good online poem are honesty and authenticity – the readers must be able to see themselves in the poem. This form of poetry is accessible in every way: in the way it is presented (online), and in terms of subject matter and language.
During my studies, I often had to interpret poems in a way that felt more like dissection than reading. Relatability and authenticity weren’t very important. As a reader, you had to work to understand the poem. The reward was comprehension, and if you were lucky, a glimpse of something higher – a transcendent experience, maybe. But you really had to earn it.
That’s not the case with Instagram poets. There’s nothing intimidating about online poetry: if you don’t get it, you just scroll on and something else will come along that does speak to you. In this way, the poems act as a kind of gateway poetry: a way to introduce ‘ordinary readers’ to an art form they might otherwise ignore.
Just sentences
Of course, there is criticism as well. ‘I understand the sentiment, but is it a poem?’ someone asks under one of Kaur’s posts. ‘Just sentences, broken up by the “enter” button’, another offers. The criticism does not only come from the comment sections. There are multiple long-read essays that are diving into ‘why Kaur is a terrible poet’ or ‘why we hate Rupi Kaur’s “poetry”.’ The simplicity of the poems makes them ideal subjects for memes and parodies.
And it can be hard to distinguish the poems from other online genres that value honesty and relatability, such as the motivational quote. The biggest difference between this quote from fitness guru Kayla Itsines and an Instagram poem seems to be the lack of line breaks and the font:
Most Instagram poems read exactly like motivational quotes. They are relatable, short and punchy, and not particularly surprising. That doesn’t necessarily speak to their literary quality – unless the boundaries of ‘literary quality’ are being stretched.
That’s exactly what Instagram poets are doing, says Martha Sprackland, editor at Poetry London. She believes online poetry is broadening the definition of what a poem is. The short lines of Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav and Nayyirah Waheed are redefining what we expect of poetry. And these poems do not only exist online. After all, authors sometimes reject the label ‘Instagram poetry’, claiming the medium is ‘the least interesting’ aspect of their work.
With slogans, inspirational quotes – because online poets insist that their work is indeed poetry and include it in their collections – our perception of poetry is changing, says Sprackland. Poems focus on honesty and accessibility, and the connection readers can make to these poems. It’s a new genre, and according to Sprackland, and critics have no place in it.
Anyone can do it
However, that does not deter critics from reading and analysing poetry on Instagram and TikTok. ‘Honesty’ and ‘accessibility’ are just ‘buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft’, according to Rebecca Watts, an editor of the poetry journal PN Review. In her article ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’, she criticises the idea that a poem’s literary value is determined by the number of followers its author has. According to Watts, the phrasing is often careless, and she finds ‘honesty’ a problematic criterion for a poem’s aesthetic value. Poetry is art, says Watts, but online poetry isn’t written by poets – it’s written by personalities. It’s impossible to assess these diary fragments on literary merit.
And they don’t have a lot of literary merit, according to Watts: online poems are consumer-driven content meant to give instant gratification to the readers. What is worse, traditional publishers and critics are going along with this new way of reading and writing poetry. ‘The art-form can no longer be accused of being elitist’, she says. Instead, we now have a form of poetry ‘that anyone can do’.
But this is exactly what attracted me to online poetry, and yet, it is the reason why I am often annoyed by the things I read. There is a fine line between being crisp and clear, on the one hand, and just plain lazy on the other.
Screen or paper
As anyone who has a phone knows, online and offline spaces are not so strictly separated. ‘Traditional’ poets and literary magazines have found their way onto the online platforms as well. Instagram accounts like @poetryisnotaluxury and literary magazines like @onlypoems share poems by a number of poets, more often than not in the form of photos of actual book pages. On TikTok, the hashtag #poetry shows videos of people opening books and reading a poem, often accompanied by instrumental music that enhance the poem’s atmosphere. Poets that publish in the traditional manner share their work online, alongside their printed work. Online poets have made their way to the printed page, but the reverse is also true: printed poems are being read online. The strict divide between online poets and ‘traditional’ ones might just be fiction.
One reason for this is the popularity of the online poets whose collections are not only extremely successful online, but in bookstores as well. They see the advantages of traditional publishing. On the other hand, for traditionally published poets, there is money to be made by growing an online audience. This has inspired poets who did not necessarily make their debut in an online space to start sharing their poems on Instagram as well.
The other reason is more prosaic. As screens got bigger, so too did the poems. In 2014, when Rupi Kaur’s first poetry collection appeared, phone screens were about half the size they are now. The literary markers of the online poetry genre were in part dictated by the medium – the screen could only fit so many lines. Line breaks were a marker of the genre, but they were necessary as well: without them, the poem would not fit the screen. The medium might be ‘the least interesting thing about their poetry’, but the Instagram poets that started out in the early 2010s arguably would have written different poems if their screens had not limited the number of characters on the virtual page.
Eleven years later, screens are bigger and so are the poems that are being shared. Ada Limón, 24th poet laureate of the United States, shares poems whose literary merits aren’t questioned. Joy Sullivan, a poet with an online audience of 109,000 readers, often posts poems from her best-selling collection. The collection is a bestseller in part because of her online audience and her way of communicating directly with the readership through online platforms and newsletters.
The gateway
For a long time, the online medium has shaped the message, but that isn’t necessarily the case anymore. Poems that are read online can be long, short or anything in between. Both TikTok and Instagram make it possible to share multiple pages in one post. However, long texts usually aren’t favoured by the algorithm: the posts that perform best are usually the ones that are quick and clear as they are the easiest to spot in the deluge of content in the feed. But now that more and more users are turning away from Meta, I suspect the way we read (online) poetry will change again.
Starting with easier poems might not be a bad thing. For many readers, the Instagram and TikTok poems were a gateway to more complex poetry. That’s exactly how it was with me. When I first started reading poetry, I mainly read poets that made their debut on Instagram, like Rupi Kaur and Nikita Gill. But over time, I started discovering others. Accounts like @poetryisnotaluxury played a part, but it was more to it than that – after reading poems online, I felt more confident in my reading abilities, and therefore enjoyed poems that required a more analytical approach. I started learning about what I liked and what I didn’t, and I started reading reviews. I read poets that were long gone and discovered they too could write in a clear and concise manner. My reading preferences did not necessarily conflict with literary value. It was an eye opener that opened up a whole new genre for me – a genre that I now read almost daily. I even write essays about it.
Therefore I cannot be dismissive of online poetry. Yes, there are better poets than Kaur or Leav out there, whose work holds more literary value. But I know that now only because I started reading online poetry, thanks to my Instafeed.
Author
Else Boer
Else Boer (1991) is an author and teacher of Dutch language and literature. She writes essays, short stories and novels. Her debut novel was published in 2021. In the autumn of this year, her third literary work will be released: a historical tale titled Halewijn.
Photo by Jeannette Huisman
