Instagram: Where Poems Go to Die

A theory on the craze behind so-called "Insta-Poets"

Image by Gaspar Uhas on Unsplash

Before we start…

In my last post I said this piece was already written and ready to go by last Friday. Well, I lied. It was only halfway finished. Luckily this newsletter is only a hobby, because if it were a real job I would’ve been fired a long time ago.

Anyway…

I mulled over what to call this piece for an inordinate amount of time. The original title was going to be something along the lines of “Why are Insta-Poets so Popular?”; or, perhaps: “The Rise of the IG Wordsmith”….but…well…these are some of the most popular “Insta-poets” publishing on Instagram today…

Rupi Kaur (4.4 million followers)

She’s a New York Times bestselling author whose debut collection of poetry, Milk and Honey, has sold over twelve million copies.

Here’s a poem from Milk and Honey that was recently reposted on IG:

From Kaur’s Instagram

Atticus (1.6 million followers)

Atticus is an anonymous poet who’s had three New York Times bestsellers. Recently posted:

From Atticus’s Instagram

R.M. Drake (2.8 million followers)

He’s another New York Times bestseller with a massive following who posted this poem with well over 15,000 likes in September 2024:

From R.M. Drake’s Instagram

r.h. Sin (2.2 million followers)

Also a New York Times bestseller who’s target audience (you might be detecting a pattern here) are women who seem to be forever recovering from a bad breakup. For instance:

From r.h. Sin’s Instagram

And…one more:

Pavana Reddy (86.9 thousand followers)

She’s amassed tens of thousands of followers sharing poems such as this:

From Pavana Reddy’s Instagram

…hence the title: “Instagram: Where Poems Go to Die”.

A note on subjectivity

I can already hear the gears of Insta-poetry fans grinding in their heads, so let me plant a flag real quick where everyone can see it.

This is a claim that warrants its own essay, but here it is: art is not completely subjective.

Yes, people have different tastes: what works for one person might be hot garbage for another. So if we take one of Rupi Kaur’s poems…let’s see…how about this one—

From Rupi Kaur’s Instagram

— it could strike one person as pure genius and another as the humiliating jottings of an angsty teenager.

So yes, one’s taste in poetry is subjective; but again—I submit to you the claim that art is not completely subjective.

Let me make two quick analogies unrelated to poetry:

Consider a pasta. Some people prefer their pasta al dente; others prefer it soft. Some people like white sauce; others like red. Yet another person might prefer rosé—and any of these options would be happily provided to you at a decent Italian restaurant. But I’ll tell you what they’re not going to serve: Kraft macaroni and cheese smothered in ketchup.

Yes, it’s technically pasta; and yes, there are people (children, mostly) who’d actually prefer Kraft mac and cheese+ketchup over any of the pastas at, say, one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants. But there are reasons why we have expressions like “she has a refined palate”—there’s nuance and complexity in food just as in there is in poetry, and people who lack a discerning sense of taste generally don’t make head chef at top-tier dining establishments for obvious reasons.

Now consider one of the fine arts—drawing. Unlike the pasta analogy, the degree to which subjectivity is a factor in determining how “good” a drawing is is murkier.

Here are two drawings of dogs:

Figure 1:

Check out artist Diona Ant’s Etsy store here

The first dog was made by artist Diona Ant and it looks like the kind of thing someone might shell out actual money for and hang in their office.

And here’s a pen drawing of a dog by yours truly:

Figure 2:

“Dog with Sun and Cloud” by Cameron S. Bradley

…so which dog is better?

Objectivity purists would pick the first dog in a heartbeat. But others might say: “Well, the second picture is funny, so I actually prefer that one as a work of art.”

Which begs the question: “Sure, but why is it funny?”

The question answers itself—it’s because the second dog is objectively bad, whether or not you subjectively prefer it over the first. I mean—it even says “meow” instead of “woof”. (A decent metric for determining whether or not a drawing is actually bad is this: can a toddler draw it just as well, if not better?)

Can anyone be an Instagram poet?

Yep. You don’t need to be a literary prodigy. What you need is an Instagram account, an internet connection, and a taste for the trite and saccharin.

Writer Andrew Lloyd, a.k.a. @ravenstarespoetry, wrote about his foray into Instagram poetry in this Vice article back in 2019. He created a new Instagram account, adopted the moniker “Raven”, and banged out 40 poems in the first week. By the end of the month, he had amassed nearly 650 followers, received a compliment from Instagram poet superstar Atticus (“Amazing work”) , and—perhaps most alarmingly—received direct messages from women who were deeply affected by his deliberately bad poetry. According to the article, one woman even “messaged to declare her soul and [Raven’s] were entwined.”

And all for writing poems like this:

From @ravenstarespoetry

But Andrew Lloyd wasn’t the first person to lampoon Insta-poetry.

Temple University students Emily Beck and Adam Gasiewski published a spoof of Rupi Kaur’s debut collection (Milk and Honey) in 2017, titled Milk and Vine. As mentioned in this Intelligencer article, the two students read Rupi Kaur’s book, decided to write their own as a joke, and settled on transcribing dialogue of popular videos from the now-defunct video sharing app Vine. It took a matter of days to curate the best Vine videos, transcribe them with Kaur-esque line breaks and italicization, and add the signature doodles.

From Milk and Vine. Image pulled from Intelligencer.

After going viral on Twitter, the book became an Amazon bestseller within hours and even briefly overtook Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey on the bestseller list.

When satire this low-effort becomes a bestseller, even if just for a few days, it’s a sure indication that people aren’t being fooled; they know how laughable the “real” poetry of Instagram really is.

My theory on why Instagram poetry sells

In my opinion, the crux of why Rupi Kaur and Atticus outsell virtually every Poet Laureate is this: their readers don’t actually like poetry. What they like to read instead are feel-good affirmations about their love lives, their bodies, their femininity. (Let’s be honest here, a quick scroll down any Insta-poet’s follower list will reveal the overwhelming majority to be women.)

And there is a separate genre of writing altogether for affirmations and encouragement: self-help books.

Not that poetry can’t make you feel good, but what Kaur and her ilk are writing are just variations on “know your worth” or “you can get through this” or “you go, girl” with line breaks.

Poetry has a reputation as being dry, dusty, and difficult. It doesn’t help that middle and high school students’ first serious encounter with poetry is often Shakespeare, who—though he was a genius—doesn’t help the average Instagram-addicted teen feel good about themselves after scrolling though images of impossibly-beautiful women on Instagram.

Kaur, on the other hand, writes simple, accessible, poems that can be read and liked as quickly as one can scroll through the ‘gram. And these words of encouragement about the “healing powers of the heart” and how “real beauty comes from within” are sandwiched between images of men and women seemingly living their best lives in digitally enhanced photographs and videos.

What’s more, Instagram users in the targeted demographic will inevitably be exposed to their poems, which is not something Ada Limón or Joy Harjo or Tracy K. Smith (the past three US Poet Laureates) can say.

And so now we have poets who are essentially writing in a vacuum, a digital landscape where only the shortest, vaguest poems can catch the eye and collect a like before being swiped away by a reader who doesn’t have the attention span to unravel and savor anything more complex than a vacuous couplet or two.

In a Vice article from 2023, Naima Rashid, author, poet and brand strategist describes Instagram poetry like this:

“The over-simplification corresponds directly with the fact that poetry can now be instantly produced and shared in front of a ready audience. Since numbers are all that matter here, the minute you have anyone, whether discerning or not, consuming it and considering it poetry, you have a following. In this cycle of ease and access, the barrier to entry is lowered. Any form of quality check is naturally thrown out of the equation.”

So there you have it. Bad poetry is rampant on Instagram because it has to be. How else could it proliferate in such an environment? It’s actually quite a shame because Instagram could be a useful medium for sharing poetry, if only the so-called Instapoets valued good verse over B-class pop-star fame.

I’ll leave you with a quote from an essay by poet and critic Rebecca Watts:

“Why is the poetry world pretending that poetry is not an art form? I refer to the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’—buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterizes their work. The short answer is that artless poetry sells.”