Reading #Instapoetry

The first collection to engage with "Instapoetry," this open access book explores the aesthetics and ideologies of the 21st century's most popular poetic form.

When Instagram was created as a photo-sharing app dominated by filtered selfies, few thought that it would have any impact on the literary world. A decade later, the best-seller lists are regularly dominated by poets whose careers started on Instagram, and their success has led to a wider resurgence in poetry reading. Instapoetry, a notably diverse movement, exists in many different languages and cultures, and it is notably hospitable to writers who are young, female, working class, and from recent immigrant or ethnic minority groups. Yet, as a genre, Instapoetry has often been subject to abuse in the literary press: even those writers frequently identified as Instapoets frequently reject the label in their eagerness to be viewed as "real" poets.

Reading #Instapoetry interrogates the practices and implications of Instapoetry as an art form. Refusing to simply condemn the simplicity and seeming artlessness of Instapoems, contributors ask how we can develop a literary-critical language that accounts for the hashtagging and graphic design elements that are key to the form. Digital humanities sampling and analysis methods are used to account for the many flows and commonalities within the hashtags that order the Instapoetry universe. The scholars also ask questions regarding the late capitalist ideologies, in particular the casualization of poetic labor, that lie at the heart of the Instapoetry endeavor, and the ways that these may undercut the supposedly woke messages of feminist celebration and self-empowerment that are common to many Instapoems.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence onbloomsburycollections.com.