Overview

This open access collection is the first to investigate the poetry of Instagram. Alongside academic essays from a variety of theoretical perspectives, it also includes accounts from people actually involved in the creation and circulation of Instapoems. In the 21st century, poetry enjoyed a publishing boom, largely thanks to the rise of a cohort of writers labelled “Instapoets” – named after the Instagram platform where many of them first became famous. The work of these writers has been controversial with other poets and literary critics, who argue that their product is in some way not really poetry: at the same time, Instapoets have reached new audiences, held sold-out readings, and been deeply loved by their fans. In this collection, writers ask how we can approach poems marked by such extreme simplicity. Can we see them as being products of their platform, created to satisfy the algorithm? Might we read their interaction with the digital environment through their hashtags? What importance should we ascribe to the high number of Instapoets from immigrant and other frequently excluded groups? What can we make of the contrast between the capitalist hustle of influencer poetry and the frequent insistence in Instapoetry on the deeply personal? Can Instapoems be generated automatically? What do they tell us about affects of the digital age? The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence onbloomsburycollections.com.

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Reading #Instapoetry attends to the complex developments of Instapoetry and the Instapoet, highlighting the cultural significance of the genre, as well as the aesthetic, political, and consumerist difficulties it presents. This edited collection is a timely examination of a phenomenon that is notoriously slippery, caught in the machinations of celebrity, social media, and publishing. Instapoetry is marked by the demands of the algorithm and the wildly diverging responses of critics and readers; as the collection makes clear, it thus offers unsettling and contested spaces, as it speaks to the anxieties of literary culture, to questions about craft, originality and the author, and to ongoing debates about identity, particularly in relation to ethics, the commodification of the personal, and the marketing of marginalized voices. Reading #Instapoetry captures these central concerns of the genre and more; it is a remarkable scholarly contribution to understanding such an intriguing and subversive poetic form. * Alyson Miller, Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin University, Australia * Reading #Instapoetry offers an appraisal of this vastly popular poetry and is relevant to many concerns in modern literary studies. The articles approach the poetry from many directions, some critical and some strongly endorsing the practice, and include historical, sociological, and technological accounts, digital humanities methods, and the contributions of poets and one of the major print publishers. This comprehensive account will play an important role in the teaching of poetry. * Nigel Fabb, Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Strathclyde, UK *

Author Information

James Mackay is Associate Professor of Literature and Digital Cultures at European University Cyprus. Previous publications include The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy (2010) and Tribal Fantasies: Native Americans in the European Imaginary 1900-2010 (2014, with David Stirrup). He is a founder-editor of the journal Transmotion, an open-access journal of Indigenous literary and cultural studies. Recent projects include a co-edited issue of the European Journal of English Studies on Instapoetry as a transnational phenomenon. JuEunhae Knox is Teaching Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK, examining AI-produced poems against Instapoetry practices, the effects of an over-inundated digital metaverse on new poetic forms, and how marginalised counterpublics resist algorithmic constrictions and platformization. Her PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow, UK, was the first to study Instapoetry and poe(t/m)-tagging in light of the Creator Economy. She led the inaugural global conference #Reading Instapoetry with James Mackay, and her article “United We ’Gram,” published by Poetics Today, scrutinizes the hypertextual effects of consumerist Instapoetry trends.

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