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To approach Instagram as a marketing tool is to misunderstand its creative heart.
Language won’t sit still, it never has. And since poems are made of language, what are they supposed to do in the digital age – where cut, pasted and transmitted text is changing how we think and communicate: lie down and think of England?
Instagram poetry has received some harsh press over recent years, hardly any of which has focused on the potential of Instagram – as a digital tool – for all kinds of different poetry. I am talking here about Instagram poetry in its broadest sense, rather than the sub-genre of Instapoetry made famous by Rupi Kaur and defined by short, emotional poems, often focused on flawed bodies and even more flawed relationships. Think of Instagram as a blank page, a digital canvas, where play and experimentation is at the fore. An open notebook for the scrolling age. Poets take chances there, trying out new approaches, using the quick feedback from followers to get a sense of what people find exciting. It is not the final say on a work – and all writers require deeper editorial engagement than Insta can provide – but as an extra platform, with huge potential to reach new people, it is one that thousands of poets are turning to. Agents and publishers should be scouting for new authors there and getting behind their current writers who embrace the space.
Instagram poetry takes place on a space of around seven centimetres by seven, on an average phone screen, with room for 20 lines of poetry at most – though most poets don’t need it. Neither did the haiku masters or the Imagists. In the hands of the right poet, 7cm by 7cm is the size of the National Theatre stage. Incredible inventions across visual, conceptual, nature, political and erasure poetry – a form delighting in removing words from a found text to reveal a "hidden" poem beneath – are taking place.
Think of Instagram as a blank page, a digital canvas, where play and experimentation is at the fore. An open notebook for the scrolling age
A few years ago, the National Poetry Library organised the world’s first exhibition of Instagram poetry. Why? Put simply, the number of young adults engaging with libraries should be higher and given that children in the UK spend approximately 48 minutes on Instagram, we were keen to experiment with how the digital field could influence our physical space. Rather than waiting for young people to seek us out, we sought them. The opening event was one of the most exciting in the library’s history, the space packed with people visiting for the first time, reading their work live and photographing their exhibited works – to post on Instagram, obviously.
This led to a book called Instagram Poetry for Every Day (Laurence King Publishers, 2020). When speaking to the contributors, we were struck by the number of poets and artists who talked of their Instagram pages as a "curated space". In addition to the nuance of each individual work, there is also the potential for poets and artists to structure their whole Instagram page like an exhibition wall, for example working with particular materials – or alternating colours – so that their entire page develops a distinctive aesthetic. As @kayf.j told us: "Instagram allows you as an artist to evolve and to look back on that evolution through your feed."
Publishers sometimes misunderstand the potential of the platform for their authors, thinking of it as a marketing tool, rather than a creative one. It is perhaps tempting for publishers to see the millions of people using Instagram as potential buyers of a newly released hardback – which perhaps some of them are – but the reality of Insta is that people who love poetry go there to find more of the thing they love, rather than to be coldly sold something new. Poets build a very loyal and personal following for their work, as can be seen in the number of tattoos featuring visual poems by @anatolknotek.
As in life, so on Insta: people become excited by what they love to see, following their favourite authors, then waiting for their next post – which can have the dopamine-pull of a Netflix series. Fans want to see inside a writer’s or artist’s world, to get a sense of their processes – their ways of writing and making. If publishers have a budget for marketing a book across social media, better to devise a strategy with the writer themselves, to showcase their new book from the inside out – using short readings from the work, photographed pages from notebooks, or even a collaboration between the writer and a visual artist. Consider putting some spend into the author’s Instagram account. Why market a book cold when fans – and potential fans – can fall in love with the work itself?
One thing for publishers to consider is that Instagram provides a space where people share their own experience. As Nikita Gill, the UK’s most successful Instapoet says: "People come together in my comments section to share … and comfort each other." This requires publishers to shift from a hierarchical way of thinking – me publisher, author good, public buy – to meeting people on a level where they can engage directly, saying what works for them. It takes courage to step into the mix.