What is Instapoetry?
It‘s more complex than you might think.
I’m sure you’ve seen them while scrolling through Instagram: the poems. Maybe you’ve read a few; maybe you’ve liked them; perhaps you’ve even left a comment. They come in all sorts of styles and fonts and compositions. They’ve found their way from the digital ether into the pages of a book.
Instapoetry as a movement has been divisive amongst poets and critics. There’s article after article after article calling Instapoetry bad or a waste of pixels or worthless as art. But I have to disagree with that sentiment, or at the very least, only agree when it comes to my lest favorite Instapoetry/poets.
I think that to call a whole subset of poetry worthless totally negates what it does accomplish; you can say you don’t get it or it's not for you, but you don’t have to degrade it to get your point across. I think that Instapoetry is one of the most accessible forms of poetry there is. The lines are typically clear, to the point, and short; emotionally intense and vulnerable; not hidden underneath layers of pretentious metaphor or overly verbose language. In other words, instantly relatable to just about anyone who reads it. I think it is this reliability that has enabled the movement to become as popular as it has been — and inspire record high poetry readership to boot.
So here are a few of my favorite Instapoetry collections that I think exemplify the form at its very best.
The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace
Amanda Lovelace is the only poet I know who writes poetry series, but it makes sense when you look at her work in conversation with each other. She has a fascination with fairytales and monsters and folklore and examines her trademark themes of abuse, mental illness, and grief through those lenses. The Princess Saves Herself in This One is her debut, the first book in her Women Are Some Kind of Magic series, and her most well-known work to date.
I also think it’s her best work. The poems within The Princess Saves Herself in This One have all the trademarks of Instapoetry — the emotional vulnerability, the short lines, the directness — and this form is incredibly suited to her content. The bluntness and the brisk line length create this feeling of unease in the reader, a feeling that things are both ending too quickly and without closure, feelings the content of the poems also evoke. The whole package together works incredibly well and moved me multiple times when I read it.
“for the
better half
of a year
i was terrified
every time
the phone rang
in case
it was another
death call.”“three more would come” by Amanda Lovelace
Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series by Tyler Knott Gregson
Tyler Knott Gregson found a typewriter in an antique store one day and wrote a poem on it. He’s written one every day on that typewriter ever since. I’m the first to admit that I hate it when people don’t revise their writing; I once met a guy who said he didn’t revise because it made the work “less true” and I told him to his face that he probably wasn’t a very good writer. But if Charles Bukowski can not revise his poetry to acclaim, (Seriously. He admits it in his letters.) then I don’t see what’s stopping Gregson.
His first collection, Chasers of the Light, is comprised of gorgeous photographs he shot himself and scanned versions of his typewritten poems. Gregson’s verse focuses mostly on love and savoring the tiny moments with a partner: waking up together, little glances across rooms, the intimacy of touch. There’s this earnest longing in his poetry that speaks to me on a deep level, and I’m sure will speak to you, too.
“What should I say
when I want to kiss
the side of your neck
and leave it at that?
When I want to feel the heat
of my own breath bounce back
and warm my lips after I
strategically place them
on my favorite pieces
of your skin.
I want to leave goosebumps
everywhere I have not yet
kissed and spend the night trying to read them
like Braille.”“What should I say” by Tyler Knott Gregson
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
You knew this was coming. How could I not include the most well-known and popular Instapoetry collection in an article defending and recommending Instapoetry?
Milk and Honey is the book on this list I have the most complicated feelings about. On the one hand, it was the book that first introduced me to reading and writing poetry, and I owe it a huge debt for that. It’s also the book that best symbolizes everything Instapoetry is about. On the other hand, it is easily the most inconsistent in terms of quality on this list. I’m not going to sugar coat it: some of these poems are really, really bad. But some of them are quite excellent. Kaur’s writing is the most approachable out of any Instapoet I’ve read. Her poetry about trauma and healing and being a woman is presented without pretense; it lays it all on the page as plainly as it can. She’s not writing for the poetic establishment. She’s writing for “that brown woman in Brampton… who is just trying to live, survive, get through her day.” And whether you think her poetry is good or not, there absolutely needs to be space for that.
“i do not want to have you
to fill the empty parts of me
i want to be full on my own
i want to be so complete
i could light a whole city
and then
i want to have you
cause the two of us combined
could set it on fire”“i do not want to have you” by Rupi Kaur
YouTuber Ariel Bisset made a documentary a few years ago called #poetry all about Instapoetry. In it, she interviews multiple successful Instapoets, academics, and publishers and comes to some conclusions that I wholeheartedly agree with, the most relevant of those conclusions being 1) Instapoets just use the platform as a means of self-publishing, not as a clout game and 2) that Instapoetry is an unseen until now non-literary form of poetry, a commercial type of poetry.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! If the dichotomy of literary and commercial exists in almost every other literary sphere, it only makes sense that it should exist within the poetic one as well. I’m so excited that poetry is expanding its boundaries and being more inclusive: in who the intended audience is, in who’s writing it, and in what poetry encompasses in the first place. I’m happy that this space exists in the digital world and the bookstore and will continue to support and defend it. At the end of the day, people should be able to like what they like without having people degrade it.
