Is Instagram A Graveyard For Bad Poetry?

We examine the niche world of Instagram poets.

by Lottie Leseberg Smith |
Dynamic

For this discerning writer, the current state of the Instagram scroll is a trip through a wasteland of inspirational quotes, short poems that almost make you feel something, and a few lines that one has definitely heard before sitting there, stale.

This is the niche category of Insta influencer poets.

Overloaded with copy and paste versions and even parodies of the poet Rupi Kaur, an Instagram poet who has found widespread acclaim on the platform, these are poems that do the exact opposite of what poetry is apparently supposed to do: make us feel.

Even the robot-artist-turned-poet Ai-Da (who we interviewed here) has turned her mechanical hand to generating a few lines. Is it that far from what Instagram poets are currently doing anyway?

We just want to feel. This is admittedly a tall order from a platform that does not, and has never, valued the real and authentic. It is a platform engineered to do quite the opposite: replicate, compare, do better, and above all else, be visible.

Our minds are a short fuse tripped out and frazzled – according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California. We now apparently turn our attention to a new task every three minutes. The option to put the phone down is not really an option at all. 

If T.S. Eliot were alive today, would his poems be hanging on this endless feed in square format, in a nostalgic typewriter font with tactically badly placed punctuation marks (to make it look more off the cuff and drunken)? Can you picture The Wasteland in a 20 post series with line drawing sketches next to them, accompanied by a Matt Maltese TikTok song? Well, no.

So how do we continue the traditions of the poets of the past?

Do we hold on, white-knuckled, to these poets, shaking a clenched fist at the sky and bemoaning the fact that ‘they just don’t make them like this anymore’? Or do we gently concede that whilst we are stuck on Instagram, we might as well make it a bearable place to be, one where we could be inspired and actually enjoy it?

Amongst the dross, there does exist a strange form of haven for poets. They speak about the trials and tribulations of being young, drugs, love, sexual assault, losing their minds, and then finding them again. They’re writing about what scares them. They feel like actual people, rather than a monkey with a typewriter.

Or perhaps the antithesis to the banality of these Insta poems, stripped of any sense of originality at all, may well be spoken word. 

In a search for these answers, I spoke to The Nasty Poet, who uses Instagram as her primary communication platform, writes and performs for brands such as Schuh, and has her own lyricism show on Foundation FM. 

Whilst she may well be my cooler older sister, and so I may well be by nature biased, I really believe she, and others like her, provide a chance to feel connected to one another.

I grew up seeing her perform at spoken word open mic nights. I heard her open up about things we had spoken about just us two and make them relatable, make them powerful and like all older siblings, she taught me a lot. 

LLS: I know about your love of telling stories. There are so many avenues you could have chosen, why was it spoken word?

It’s all about telling a story, sharing an experience and I find spoken word the best way to do that. 

I feel like poetry shouldn’t be something that is tucked away for only the elite of society, we should be talking about things that connect us as human beings and sharing our lived realities and listening to other peoples. 

Spoken word was a term given to poets that were speaking poetry, because due to the elitism within poetry, academics decided they couldn’t be called just poets. Spoken word is about reclaiming poetry as something that everyone has access to.

For me, I love that it’s built on vulnerability, it evokes emotion, the oldest form of storytelling. Why should that be kept to a small sect of society, and be given a different name for everyone else. 

LLS: When you’re pushing for accessibility and building this community, why did you choose Instagram, when it’s so saturated with copy-paste versions of poems you feel like you have already read?

I chose Instagram because of its accessibility. Everyone has access to it there. 

The audience is a huge part of who I am and what I do in performance poetry. For me it’s all of it, the words, the visual, the audio, it reminds people I’m an actual person with a story to tell.

LLS: Honestly, what do you think about insta poetry? Do you read it?

Writers in that format are really interesting to me. Sometimes I skip past it, because a lot of it, to me, doesn’t make me feel connected with the person that’s writing it. It is immediately a missed connection to me when I just see text.

When there’s thought into how it’s presented, with illustrations or video, I find there is successful storytelling. With small amounts of text you can’t tell that much of a story, and so I only look at text when there are illustrations,or pictures, because it builds the story.

There’s so much of it that gets so lost, it’s a shame. 

Yes, it is accessible and bite sized, but it gave way to a new wave of poetry or format of poetry that washes through the internet without pause. Easy likes but not enough time to engage in feeling. It works and it doesn’t at the same time.

LLS: Whilst most Instagram poets upload written text as the image, you upload a picture of yourself, and then use the caption as the poem. Why is that?

On Instagram, I feel like it’s very easy to scroll past pictures of text, Insta is truly so full of inspirational quotes, short poetry, you can glaze past it, but a picture of someone, who they are, gives you that person first, emotional connection.

I also find that it puts poetry into the mainstream, people who aren’t interested in poetry, who might not pick up a poem book, are going to read it in my captions.

LLS: I know that you put so much of yourself in your poetry. I know that so much personal stuff. Are you ever scared to post something?

Yeah. I wrote this poem called 97%.

I wrote it for me and for men, to understand that fear is such a lived reality for all women, and it can manifest in any environment at any time of the day. 

I posted it in audio format with the text coming up on the screen as it was read out. I was so nervous to post it because I was worried that people might think it was just me, and then so many women came forward and told me they felt the same. 

I hope that people would feel less alone. 

As a woman and a person, and also an artist, to be able to connect with people, this is how we are feeling. A lot of men had never thought about that. 

When I performed it at a women’s march, it was so emotional. 

I felt sick afterwards, I actually felt sick, because I cared so much, I ran into my mum’s arms crying after, I completely broke down, because the words that i was speaking were so real.

LLS: Making people feel less alone is clearly so important to you. Is this why you made a book? 

I’m so used to performing physically, or posting on instagram that people are only usually listening to me in an audio-visual format. At a time when a lot of people were at home, the only contact people had with the physical world was through the virtual world, so I wanted to take my work out of the virtual and into the physical, creating something that people could hold was really interesting to me. 

It was a way of being able to hold my friends, hold my family, so crucial to my being was physical touch. The book was kind of the flesh.

Someone would be holding my work, in their hands, in their homes. 

LLS: When you first started going out to poetry nights when you were a teenager, you’d always go to poetry nights in South East London, like the A&theE, listening to poets like James Massiah and Caleb Femi. What was it about that atmosphere and experience which inspired you? 

It was honest, it was real, speaking what you feel. What I engage with now, is theirs, not because I don’t want to read established written poets, these are just the people I found I connected with emotionally. 

When I first got into poetry, I saw it and I still see it as part of culture in the same way as music, radio and even art. The things that I’m talking about, everyone has felt these things – whether you have gone out on a night out and messed things up, or whatever. It’s everyday life, the mundane, the highs or the lows, my life, the culture that I live in and as a result the work that I create.

One of my first projects was nasty poet audiobook that was produced by a grime producer. They were two different worlds that actually aren’t that far apart from each other. I feel like it really showed the power of lyricism, which is so transcendent. Connecting things. 

I have a radio show where I talk about lyricism, with musicians, poets, writers, producers, because it’s not about the words, it’s the stories that you’re telling, the world that you’re living in.

LLS: I feel like instagram is a huge part of the world that we are living in, so it makes sense that you post it there. But I feel like the reason why your poetry steps out from the rest is because you are not posting it for instagram, you’re posting it to tell a story. Is that why you write?

Why I write, it’s because i can’t not. And that really is the bottom line, I have to do it, something that’s so intrinsic within me without doing it, I don’t feel alive.

____

So it seems that when you have to write, it’s by any means possible. So onto Instagram we go. 

And so we scroll. 

We scroll through Instagram trying to wake up our dopamine sensors, and the words, spoken or small and bite sized, all that can be chewed, hit home. Before we go back to thieving our own joy in our favourite game of comparison. 

And so we scroll in what is not just yet a graveyard site, all thanks to a few spoken word poets, clinging on.

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