Why you're probably wrong about Instapoetry

What defenders and detractors don't understand about Kaur-core

Whenever I want to write something about Instapoetry, I go on the hunt for a profile I once read on Rupi Kaur. In it, the interviewer goes on a visit to a bookstore with the poet. Kaur visits a few bookshelves in the fiction section and excitedly returns with a couple of classics, one of them by Hemingway. The interviewer enquires whether Kaur is at all influenced by these works to which she replies that she’s interested in the covers.

For all of Kaur’s detractors, this would come across as a smoking gun for her being out of place within the literary canon, for her interest in literature to be revealed as shallow and surface value. But that wasn’t my interpretation. I saw it as a great example of Kaur’s knowledge and wisdom on how the literary intersects with the visual. How, in today’s mediums, we see a writer before we read them.

I would say all of this if it wasn’t for the minor inconvenience of not being able to find the bloody article. Or, to take it a little further, that I have scoured the web for the article and am beginning to believe that I never read the thing in the first place. And yet, this article that might only exist in the pound-shop Borgesian library in my head, has helped to inform my understandings and challenge my presumptions about Instapoetry.

Instapoetry, or Kaur-core as I would rename it in my future dictatorship, fascinates me. It really isn’t for me and I can’t say that I get much from it in a strictly literary sense. I am not the intended audience, as is the case for all of the inveterate gasbags in the literary world who bemoan Instapoetry’s popularity and ubiquity. There is never a sense of curiosity about why the Instapoets are so successful beyond some misanthropic dismissal of the casual reader of poetry.

I think my sympathy is a symptom of my initial career as part of the performance scene where the same dismissive attitude was pointed at genres of live poetry. A lot of it comes down to seeing the literary poem and the process of close reading as the benchmark for which all other poetry cultures are derived from and judged by.

So, for the literary mindset, a poem that succeeds in performance must be brought to the true medium of the page so that it can be exposed, through close reading, as a bad poem that has deceived its audience through the smoke and mirrors of performance technique. Kae Tempest previously told a story of a university lecturer who played a video of them performing a poem, before the lecturer gave his own reading of the poem to point out that the poem might have sounded good when Tempest performed it, but when he read it in his own voice and reading style, it was suddenly unmasked as a bad poem all along.

I hope I don’t have to point out the flaws in this lecturer’s reasoning. What is it about the lecturer’s voice and reading that makes it a more authentic reading of the poem, as opposed to the person who composed the poem for their own particular voice and performance style?

The same applies for Instagram poets. Their poems are specifically composed to be read on an Instagram feed by a specific audience and demographic. Yes, the poem, especially within a purely literary substext, might seem abstract and nothingy when subject to close reading, but it was not composed for that kind of context.

The context for reading an Instagram poem is within a constant, scrolling feed of instagram posts, many of which might consist of toxic ideology or unattainable social and physical ideals. The Instapoem is as ephemeral as much of this content and it needs to be. Its job is to arrest the eye as the thumb idly scrolls through a feed. It makes its point quickly and then vanishes into the churn of content. Its job is not so much to make the scroller look up, switch off and touch grass. Its job is to make the act of scrolling a less toxic experience.

It’s also worth remembering that there is a lot of variety within the genre of Instapoetry. Warsan Shire found a big audience on Instagram but her poetry also stands up within the literary context, with her work fitting in well on prize shortlists and poetry journals alike. Rupi Kaur’s style is often lampooned and satirised but none of these caricatures take account of her mastery for visual presentation, how the slight, abstract poems are often accompanied by line drawings that recontextualise, intensify or contradict them. In the same way that a Kae Tempest performance is the poem and not a derivative recontextualisation of a written text, Kaur’s entire visual presentation of text and image within the context of an instagram feed (or catalogue-like book published by a coffee-table doorstop publisher rather than a traditional poetry publisher), is the poem.

Of course, there are legions of Instapoets that I find harder to defend, where there isn’t much nuance or style to play against their nothingy-ness, bar a fetishisation of the typewritten or hand-written physical page. But then again, I also find it hard to defend literary poets who write about having epiphanies on holiday or constantly use the word “father” instead of “dad” because it sounds more important (dear reader, I am guilty of both).

Similarly, when dealing with Instapoetry in the lecture theatre, I ask my students the same thing I always ask of them, to take account of but then move beyond their initial emotional response to a poem and see what else they can get from it. If the poem doesn’t reward close reading as much as a Romantic Ode might, then what other ways are there of looking at it?

Incidentally, in a Radio 4 documentary about Instapoetry a few years back, another university professor spoke about how they play a game with their students by reading out unattributed excerpts of the Romantics interspersed by unattributed Instapoems. The fact that students are sometimes unable to tell the difference isn’t quite as illuminating for me as it’s presented. You can cut off a pleasingly platitudinous morsel from a Keatsian Ode but you’ll miss out on the context of how such a poem shifts its discourse from stanza to stanza and illustrates the grand statements with plenty of captivating images. In the same way, if you read out an Instapoem alongside Romantic soundbites, you are substituting a possibly grandiose reading for its visual presentation and original context. The comparison does little to define how we find the good in different poetries nor the aims and social contexts of both genres.

Instapoetry is completely at ease with the transience of its medium. It is not a kindred spirit to Edmund Spenser who, after trying to write his beloved’s name in the wet sand as the tide comes in, swears that her name will live on through his poetry. To the Instapoet, that name on the sand in the moment before the wave obliterates it is the poem. And the one that follows it. And the one that follows that one too.

A brief note on what I’m up to

Right now, as stated in a previous post, I’m writing a digital pamphlet that will be published as a combined ebook and audio book. The current working title is “this humdrum day with its unwieldy hours shot through with brilliant fragments”. It features two longer poems that make use of a new form/technique that I’m playing around with at the moment and a few more poems that are more familiar to my usual themes and style.

Once it’s ready I’ll put it up for sale on an online store (probably gumroad or itch.io) but I’ll also launch a paid subscriber tier for this substack that will include “this humdrum day…” and all future digital pamphlets.

Unless you want to support my writing regularly then the former option would probably be the better value one. As more digital pamphlets drop it should become a better proposition. Especially if you want to take the scumbag option of reading all of them and then immediately cancelling. I call it the scumbag option because it’s what I’d probably do.

Thanks for reading this

Niall