Instagram is more than just a spot for aesthetic blogs. There are many different communities, ranging from fandoms to cosplayers and just about everything between or outside of these. One of the communities that seem to be flourishing is the poetry community.
Contemporary poetry is thriving on and off of the shelves, particularly on Instagram. It’s easy to share complete poems in photos or album posts, and words stick out when scrolling through the feed full of pictures. Poets who started out on Instagram are releasing books now, to the extent that there are some bookstores dedicating displays solely to “Poets of Instagram.”
What we often aren’t taught in school is that poetry is a diverse art form, that comes in many shapes and forms. They don’t have to rhyme, and the meaning isn’t always buried. You don’t always have to tear the poem down to simple words to find what it means. Not every poem has a definitive meaning, and they can mean different things to different people.
On a social media platform, people are more willing to give poems a chance, especially since most are short to accommodate to the method they’re being posted. Tyler Knott Gregson, one of the most popular Instagram poets with more than 325,00 followers, posts at least once a day to keep up his “Daily Haiku on Love” project. Poets like Beau Taplin and J. Iron Word, both with more than 425,000 followers, posts poems more reminiscent of short sentences or paragraphs of prose.
These examples only stand for part of the population, never mind with the smaller accounts that often hold contests, collaborations, and share for shares. The community is constantly expanding, and supporting one another like a family as it grows.
The subject matter ranges just as much as the form does, so there is something for everyone. The Instagram search page is filtered to what you like based off what accounts you follow, but it’s likely that at least one poem will end up in the mix, and following this can lead you down quite the rabbit hole of poetry, until you’re sifting through accounts that appeal to you and those that don’t.
And if you’re lucky, you’ll be skimming through words and find a poem that hits you hard in the chest because you understand it. It’ll knock the wind out of you because it resonates with you.
It’ll show you that poetry is more than just what you were taught in school. It’s more than Poe and Frost, more than old dead people and suffering. It’ll remind you, or maybe just teach you, that poetry is an art form.
The Instagram poetry community continues to grow and prosper and reaches more and more people as it does. Social media is resurrecting what could be thought of as a dead art form by bringing it to people’s attention, further expanding both the community and its fan base. If Instagram can do this with poetry so easily, it’s a wonder what else it can do. Only time will tell, and we’ll have plenty of poems to read until we find out, and even after.
