How poetry survives on Instagram

It can be said that the internet has pretty much replaced everything. When English Literature majors think of poetry, they would probably think about Iambic Pentameters, William Wordsworth, or a grotesque war poem by Wilfred Owen. In today’s day and age, poetry has taken a different turn.

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms where people share pictures and videos with their followers. ‘Insta-poet’ is a term that represents those who upload their work on this site for a large community of online poets. According to The Atlantic, around one half of poetry books sold in the past years were written by Insta-poets. The poet’s Instagram feed would all together be a replacement of a book having posts instead of pages. This approach of creating an Instagram account and putting your words out there has proven to be easier than presenting a draft of your book to a publishing house; however, it has major disadvantages. Unless your work is copyrighted, anyone can discredit you.

Rupi Kaur by Carlota Guerrero

Rupi Kaur is a very famous Canadian poet who established her name on Instagram. Her aesthetically-pleasing Instagram feed, touching words and the tiny sketches that accompany them, she has reached out to millions around the world. With 3 million followers, Kaur has sold almost 4 million copies of her book ‘milk & honey’, which was translated in 40 languages. Her most recent published work ‘the sun and her flowers’ has debuted at No. 1 on the New York Time’s Best Seller.

Nikita Gill, who has been called the ‘Poet of Millennials’, is a poet based in the UK and who debuted her work on Instagram back in 2015. Ever since, Gill has published 3 books despite being rejected by 137 publishers.

“I turned the rejections into fuel to better my writing. I can honestly say that all those rejections were excellent for my spirit and my soul.”

Her poetry has reached the hearts of the broken-hearted as it deals with themes like love and loss. In an interview with Gill, she has said the term ‘Insta-poet’ is limiting as she publishes her work on other platforms like Facebook and Tumblr.

Photo source

New Zealander novelist and poet Lang Leav is another name in the business of Instagram poetry. She has published 8 books, most of which are poetry love poems. She has sold around a million copies of her books and has made the list of Top 100 love poets of Amazon. However, Leav has also dismissed the term ‘Insta-poet’ claiming that she found fame on Tumblr and that she’s more into novels anyways. She explains her simple style of writing is “because [her] first job was as a translator for [her] parents, so [she] had to distill the language in a way that they could understand.”

Instagram is definitely a great space for writing but it can become limiting when you become more successful. But it’s worth giving a shot if you’re waiting to be recoginzed!