Instapoetry is successful and there’s nothing wrong with that

By Rafael Mendes Silva, Trinity College Dublin

It looks like this:

words of encouragement

or about love

divided into stanzas

signed off

with the poet’s name

Instagram poetry has made writers like Rupi Kaur and Donna Ashworth rise to stardom, amassing thousands of followers and earning them quite a bit of money.

As a subgenre of poetry, it combines self-help, reflections on romantic relationships, identity and plain language to create poems that users can quickly grasp and share through hashtags like #instapoetry. Visually, Instapoetry is often accompanied by drawings, uses typewritten fonts and has an overall lack of capitalisation and punctuation.

If you like instapoetry, you’ve likely heard all the arguments for why it’s an unserious sub-genre that shouldn’t be seen as “real” poetry. However, its popularity and its boost to overall poetry sales should be taken more seriously by the establishment – as should young people’s love of it.

While it is hard to track down who created Instapoetry, most sources agree that Lang Leav, a Cambodian-Australian writer, was the first success story. As she gained popularity online, Andrews McMeel Publishing closed a deal with her for her book Love and Misadventure, which has sold more than 150,000 copies.

Since then, Instapoetry has accumulated millions of followers across the web and beyond. Rupi Kaur has sold more than 11 million copies of her books and embarked on an 11-month world tour. The success of Kaur and several other Instapoets has been linked by the publishing industry to a general increase in poetry sales, driven partly by young people.

Poetry for the internet

Key to Instapoetry’s appeal is its accessibility. Instagram enables direct communication between the author and readers, who use the comment section to express their responses to the poem and communicate with each other, creating a community – or at least the sense of one.

The community of Instapoetry-readers is fundamental for the poets. The more interaction their posts or poems receive, the more the content and artwork will be spread.

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