In recent years, we’ve witnessed the explosion of Instapoetry, the phenomenon of bite-sized, aesthetic poems posted on social media. The defining qualities of a typical instapoem are its simple language, short length, and straight-forward themes. Rupi Kaur has been a major contributor to the popularity of this style of poetry; her poetry collections, including Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers, embody the simplicity of Instapoetry and feature non-traditional formal choices, such as her signature italicization of a poem’s final line. Although Kaur’s collections are published in print, much of her work was first composed for Instagram and continues to be posted there.
The culture of Instapoetry (much like the culture of social media in general) values readership and engagement, often at the expense of quality; the integrity of the poem is less important than the poem’s ability to appeal to and resonate with a large audience. In academic spaces, Instapoetry is often deemed oversimplified and vapid compared to what I will call “traditional poetry” (the kind of poems we might study in school or read in a literary journal).
But that, of course, raises the question of what makes a poem good, and who sets those rules. If the goal of poetry is to make the reader feel something, Instapoetry is just as successful as traditional poetry, and the proof is in the comment section of any viral poem.
But emotion isn’t necessarily what makes a poem good. When we read a poem, we certainly feel things, but we also see things and (when reading the poem aloud) hear things. Instapoetry often places too much weight on feeling, which makes our experience of the poem imbalanced; we are not given the rich imaging, precise language, and intentional music that we expect from traditional poetry. Although these poems have an emotional impact, they are not as vivid or elaborate as they could be if more attention was paid to form; for this reason, instapoems sometimes come across as melodramatic or one-dimensional. But despite this, it is undeniable that Instapoetry evokes emotion in readers; after reading an instapoem, you can easily identify its message and how it makes you feel.
But perhaps the beauty of traditional poetry lies in the presence of an indefinable quality or theme. After reading a good poem, it is often difficult to identify what exactly it is you’re feeling; you just know that you’ve been impacted. In poetry workshops, we often use this word—“impact”—to reference particularly evocative and powerful lines, because we feel the intensity of several emotions at once. That is one of the most powerful qualities of traditional poetry—its ability to explore the complexity of human emotion and to inhabit a space in which we do not just feel sad or happy or in love or heartbroken or angry or peaceful but many or even all of these things at once. In this way, traditional poetry captures what it is to be human: the intricacy of the way we feel about everyone and everything; the reservations of our positive emotions; the exceptions to our negative emotions.
The purpose of traditional poetry is to capture what cannot be captured in any other form, and therefore cannot be exactly translated into a thematic statement. We can list a poem’s themes and explain how the poet develops them, but we cannot truly answer the question of “what is the poem saying?” without losing the magic of how it is said, or “how does the poem make me feel?” without losing the complexity of how it is felt.
But when analyzing an instapoem, it is often easy to capture and translate the poem’s themes without losing the poem’s integrity. The thematic value of Instapoetry is disproportionately rooted in its diction, rather than other poetic elements like line and stanza breaks, sound, and strong, original imaging. For this reason, most instapoems could relay the same message and evoke the same feelings in another format: a prose piece, a song, etc.
In many ways, the easily identifiable themes of Instapoetry are what makes it so appealing. There is nothing to decode—it is easier to understand and less technical than the poetry we are used to reading in literature classes. For this reason, Instapoetry is extremely accessible to a wide variety of audiences, many of whom feel alienated by traditional poetry. The value of this cannot be understated.
I am a firm believer that you do not need a fancy degree to write good poems, and you do not need to be involved in an academic space to be a legitimate writer or reader of poetry. But I argue that so many of the qualities that draw us to Instapoetry—the beautiful and simplistic language, the emotional impact, the empowering themes—are also present in traditional poetry. But for some reason we approach traditional poetry so much differently. We approach it with fear, or with disinterest, because we think that we have to dissect it and come up with smart things to say about it.
But we don’t always have to view poetry through this academic, analytical lens. We don't have to understand a poem completely in order to love it. Sometimes the best way to experience a poem is to bask in its music and feel what it urges us to feel.
None of this is to say that all instapoets are bad writers or that all Instapoetry is bad poetry.
This is to say that we need to be cautious of what social media is doing to poetry. We need to acknowledge that there are things being carved away. And we need to ensure that Instagram is not our only exposure to the vast, profound world of poetry. Instapoetry is intricate and valuable in its own right, but it cannot be a replacement for the traditional. We often think of traditional poetry as “elitist,” but in fact, it is a refuge for so many marginalized voices. There is so much to learn from classic poetry but also from the work of contemporary “traditional” poets, some of the best of whom teach right here at Emory.
Ideally, social media poems would be a gateway or a complement to other literary works. But if, in your life, the alternative to Instapoetry is an absence of poetry completely, then please read poems on Instagram. Read as many as you can.
Any poetry is better than no poetry at all.
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