Taking Instapoetry Seriously: A Review of Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram

By now, the claims about the literary value of Instagram poetry (Instapoetry)—either that it is the death of poetry or the democratization of it—have become ubiquitous. But are these claims true—and are they worthy of so much scholarly attention? In Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram, an open access collection edited by JuEunhae Knox and James Mackay, contributors seek to push beyond this argument doused in complex claims to literary and cultural value to engage in “serious examination(s) of Instapoetry as a literary phenomenon” (7). Bringing together academic essays, interviews, and reflections from practitioners on the genre of Instapoetry, this collection critically examines Instapoetry to argue that Instapoetry is worthy of serious scholarly attention. Although other scholarly collections on Instapoetry exist, including the 2023 special issue of The European Journal of English Studies, Hashtags across Borders: Considering #Instapoetry as a Transglobal and Translingual Literary Movement, this is the first book of scholarly criticism on Instapoetry to emerge on the market. The book comprises an introduction and thirteen chapters from scholars, writers, and poets from a range of careers and career levels and from varied disciplinary backgrounds. In what follows, I provide an overview of the academic and creative articles and evaluate the collection as a whole.

E-literature, Hashtags, Data, Marginalized Voices, and the Anthropocene

The collection begins with a reprint of Kathi Inman Berens’ seminal article, “E-Lit’s #1 Hit: Is Instagram Poetry E-literature?” Originally published by ebr, Berens’ article is hugely influential not only to Instapoetry scholars but to the field of e-literature (e-lit) as well. The article was the first to directly lay claim to Instapoetry as part of third-generation e-lit, interrogating whether brevity and mass popularity disqualified these works from being classified as e-lit. The republished essay now features a preface with Berens’ reflections on the world (and the world of e-literature) since the initial publication, in which Berens contemplates the tensions between critical awareness and influence—often associated with e-lit—and access, inclusion, and community, all bedrocks of Instapoetry. Importantly, her reflections post-2020 deepen the critique: she situates Instapoetry within surveillance capitalism, drawing on Shoshana Zuboff to argue that printed Instapoetry volumes—like Rupi Kaur’s books—offer a form of resistance to platform commodification by enabling private reading outside algorithmic harvesting. This addition makes the essay not just a foundational text, but a timely reminder of how far the conversation has shifted since 2020. The reprint is indispensable—the article is one of the first sustained academic treatments of Instapoetry while also adding reflexive critique after years of social, literary, and technological change. This addition makes the essay not just a foundational text, but a timely reminder of how far the conversation has shifted since 2020. Beginning with this reprint certainly sets the tone: the authors in the collection are not simply arguing over whether Instapoetry is good or bad but are presenting unique and important arguments and methods for evaluating Instapoetry.

One such chapter is “#Tagged: Hashing Meaning through Poe(t/m)-tagging,” in which Knox coins the term poe(t/m)-tagging (pronounced po-tum-tagging) to describe the act of using hashtags of poets or poems to “promote any product for external, commercial rewards” (32). Knox’s framework clarifies how Instagram users deploy hashtags not only for visibility but also as a means of connecting to the literary canon or parodying Instapoets (Rupi Kaur in particular has been subject to this type of hashtag parody). The concept of poe(t/m)-tagging is novel in its approach to hashtag use in digital writing, seeking not simply to trace patterns of hashtag use across Instapoets of a certain demographic (e.g., national, regional, ethnic groups) but instead to understand how hashtags are employed both as a tool of visibility and as a signifier of connection to ‘high-brow’ literature. However, there is an element of terminology confusion here: although ‘tagging’ is colloquially interchangeable with ‘hashtagging’ across many social media sites, the affordance of ‘tagging’ on Instagram is actually a separate function from hashtagging, in which a user uses @ followed by the username of the account they wish to tag (“Tagging and Mentions”). It’s clear from Knox’s article that she is referring to the colloquial use of ‘tagging’ as in ‘hashtagging’, but for those less familiar with the affordances of Instagram, the terminology may cause confusion.

Both the reprint of Berens’ article and Knox’s chapter ask urgent questions about how users employ different affordances on Instagram and demonstrate the importance of researchers’ access to Instagram data. In their chapter, “Missed Possibilities from Unobtainable Data: The Case of Instapoetry and a Wish to Go Beyond Rupi Kaur,” Camilla Holm Soelseth and Eleonora Natalia Ravizza unpack this core methodological dilemma of today: researchers’ dependency on data from private platforms, where access is restricted or retroactively cut off when APIs are shut down. Their work points to a troubling epistemic constraint—that the architecture of corporate platforms not only mediates cultural production but also silences scholarly exploration by limiting or restricting access entirely. The authors also caution against researchers seeking to situate Rupi Kaur (or other well-known Instapoets) as representative of the genre as a whole; the urge to do so, they argue, is a result of algorithmic influence or the fact that these Instapoets have become canon because the algorithms favour them. Focusing research solely on the most famous Instapoets simply perpetuates the canonization of these poets and the further marginalization of those without the algorithms on their side, which is ironic considering the origins of Instapoets as a marginalized group largely ignored by literary elites and excluded from literary canons. Soelseth and Ravizza also outline one of the most pressing concerns for scholars of digital literary culture: access to the data and content required to conduct our research, archive new modes of literature, and more. These questions will only become more dire as social media APIs continue to be restricted.

Most of the chapters in this collection are, in one way or another, pushing back against the overused claim that Instapoetry lacks literary or cultural value. In “‘The Floodgates Have Been Opened’: Instapoetry and the Recentering of Marginalized Poets,” which appears approximately halfway through the collection, Laura Gallon takes to task Rebecca Watts’ “targeted attack on a ‘cohort of young female poets’ (2018:13)” in her PN Review article titled “The Cult of the Noble Amateur” (Watts 13; Mackay and Knox 100). Watts’ article has become one of the most widely cited articles on Instapoetry and has certainly generated significant debate, but it has also resulted in much of the current discourse focusing solely on whether the poetry is bad because it’s simplistic, or good because it’s so relatable (Adler; Ali; Ramanathan; Yuan and Hill). Instead, Gallon argues that women poets, at much higher rates than men poets (including Atticus and r.h. Sin), get dragged into the “territorial dispute” over “what gets defined as poetry and craft, who gets defined as a poet, and who can claim the authority to make such decisions” (100). Instead of focusing on these limiting arguments, which Gallon says can overshadow the cultural value of Instapoetry for both readers and writers, Gallon here argues that Instapoetry emerged because of the lack of publishing opportunities for writers of colour, especially women. Certainly, there is a long history of the denigration of women’s writing because of its association with sentiment and affect, the popular, and emergent technologies that Gallon seems to be gesturing toward. The writing of Instapoets has been denigrated in many similar ways to women’s writing throughout history, for example, the poetess tradition of 19th-century Britain. Gallon’s argument is apt, and her chapter offers one of the first published accounts of the complexity of the emergence of Instapoetry, as well as the transformative influence the genre has had on the publishing industry. Perhaps most importantly, Gallon argues that “it is our duty, as critics, to consider our potential role in further silencing already marginalized voices under the authoritative guise of craft” (105-6). An important reminder to all scholars engaging with Instapoetry, Gallon’s call to consider the critic’s role in further marginalizing writers is a pivotal contribution to this collection.

Several of the authors produce chapters that move beyond value-based judgments of Instapoetry to examine understudied elements of Instapoetry and Instapoets. For instance, María Carla Sánchez writes about teaching Salvadoran-Californian Instapoet Yesika Salgado’s poetry in undergraduate classes and asks if Instapoetry can nurture a nuanced critique of institutional gatekeeping and cultural hierarchies. In particular, the chapter speaks to three noteworthy and oft-critiqued elements of Instapoetry as a genre: its perceived relatability, the demographics of Instapoetry readers, and the transition of poetry to the short-form, social media content characteristic of much Instapoetry. Sánchez positions her experiences teaching against students’ written responses to reading Salgado’s work. The conclusions from her students are clear: Sánchez notes, for young undergraduate student readers of poetry, the future of poetry is now “fat, fly, brown, and online,” a play on Salgado’s self-description. Other chapters that push the boundaries of Instapoetry scholarship include Millicent Lovelock’s chapter. Lovelock draws on Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics and Eva Illouz’s work on emotional capitalism to argue that Rupi Kaur’s poetry offers a site of self-transformation and belonging for her readers via the expression of shared experiences rooted in the trauma of being a woman in a neoliberal culture. Lovelock ultimately concludes, however, that because the “promise of transformation in Kaur’s poetry” (130) is solely a transformation of the self, it does not go far enough and reproduces the neoliberal logic of individualism. Melissa Sarikaya analyzes common marketing strategies used by Instapoets to produce authenticity on Instagram. Taking a post-structuralist approach, Sarikaya examines the various tactics Hollie McNish takes to “escape the hyperreal” (178), including turning the audience into follower-consumers, targeted, widespread dissemination, transparency, and positive reinforcement. Zak Bronson and Warren Steele examine the platformization of poetry in the digital age and examine the genre in the wider context of the platform economy and the commodification of social media. Notably, Bronson and Steele note that platformization “entails a transformation in how content is produced and distributed on the platform” (186), marking the broader changes to poetry creation, production, and dissemination that occur on Instagram. These chapters all provide necessary scholarship and insights into the complex realm of Instapoetry and poetry production on social media.

Concluding the collection, James Mackay and Polina Mackay assess the Instapoem as a material object to articulate the carbon footprint of Instapoetry in the Anthropocene. The question of the carbon footprint of digital technology, such as AI and GenAI, has become increasingly present as of late. Mackay and Mackay’s chapter models one way of getting at the complexity of the carbon footprint of an Instapoem, considering not only the individual post but its relation to the smartphone environment in which it appears. It would be interesting to see this work taken one step further, and consider not only the Instapoem on Instagram, but as it flows from smartphone screen to print page, to being performed on a stage. What would the carbon footprint of an Instapoem be if all elements of Instapoetry were taken into consideration?

Interviews and Reflections on Creative Contributions

One of the book’s pleasures is its refusal to be purely academic. The interview with Kirsty Melville, president of Andrews McMeel Publishing, is especially engaging. Dubbed a “Sylvia Beach of the Instagram generation” for her role in bringing Instapoets, including Rupi Kaur and Lang Leav, into mainstream publishing, Melville candidly recounts how Andrews McMeel, once focused on humor and gift books, recognized and nurtured social-media-based poets, enabling them to scale distribution and capitalize on real-time cultural momentum. Her reflections underscore the changes that have occurred as a result of social media poets, not only in the publishing industry but in modes of reading itself. Melville remarks that, before the resurgence of YA fiction in recent years began bringing more young readers into physical bookstores, Instapoetry had achieved this feat. The interview provides a strong account of the history of the genre, including discourse over the term ‘Instapoetry’ itself, and highlights Andrews McMeel’s role in publishing Instapoetry. It is an important read for anyone exploring the intersections of social media, literary culture, and digital culture.

Equally compelling are the creative reflections. Yara Gawrieh Ekmark pens a reflective piece on her experience writing poetry and posting it to an Instagram account, titled “Instant Confessions.” In her writing process, she reflects many of the themes discussed by Melville in the interview—the emphasis on raw emotion, on readers seeing themselves in the work, and on poets finding a place for themselves on a platform not dominated by literary gatekeepers. Gawrieh Ekmark notes the confessional nature of her writing on Instagram, describing it as both a “confession to the world” (81) and “a poetic-diary style of writing” (82), in which the relatability of her poetry shone through to readers. Many critics of Instapoetry have argued that the genre’s relatability is one of its primary weaknesses (see: Roberts, Watts). Yet, for Gawrieh Ekmark, the relatability is entirely the point. She writes:

The recognition of shared emotions and complexities through Instapoems is what makes the platform experience worth it. Therefore, I would suggest that Instapoems should be read with instinct rather than intellect. The emotional urgency and resonance of Instapoems result in an immediate stream of responses from readers on Instagram (83).

For Gawrieh Ekmark, then, an important part of writing Instapoetry is sharing in the experience of having your poetry be relatable and be responded to by readers. In this way, Gawrieh Ekmark remarks, the private and the public become fused in a complex and engaging way that encourages the posting of more poetry. Thus, it makes sense to read Instapoems with ‘instinct’—perhaps another word for this could be emotion, or feeling—rather than ‘intellect’, which may lead to more denigration and dismissal of the genre. Although I take Gawrieh Ekmark’s point—Instapoetry is about more than the text on the page—this argument runs the risk of reinforcing the argument Gawrieh Ekmark seems to oppose: that Instapoetry does not uphold literary craft. Laura Tansley takes a similar reflective approach in her article, “‘Former Contours’: Posts, (Post) Pregnancy and Re/turning to Creative Processes,” where she documents her experience using Instagram as a means of remaining connected to creative writing while pregnant with her first child. Tansley opens by pondering the “wrench between work and mothering,” in which “becoming a parent suddenly becomes an anathema to creativity and productivity, and vice versa” (89). Pushing against the often-experienced loss of self during motherhood, Tansley looked to Instagram to devise a new process of writing that better fit her current lifestyle. While walking post-pregnancy, she carried a collection of items with her—“a pen; a slim, A6 size notebook; a pack of three pads of mini, neon-colored, small Post-it notes; my phone” (91)—and wrote “words or phrases that sprang to mind” to the Post-its, placed them in the “scene” where she was walking, took a photo with her phone, and uploaded the photo to Instagram (91). Tansley’s Instagram-facilitated creative writing process not only supported her throughout her post-pregnancy journey but also brought new questions and considerations to mind. Referencing Rebecca Watts’ above-referenced takedown of Instapoets, Tansley reflects on how Instapoetry is evaluated and concludes that, if the poetry is produced in order to capture “our ongoingness, re/presenting our ever-present,” (97) then the poetry should also be considered within that frame. What I take from this statement is that existing modes of evaluating literature do not work for transmedia modes of literary production like Instapoetry, which require an examination of the writing, the performance, the platform, and the reader community all at once.

Room for Improvement

What is confusing about this collection, however, is the inclusion of a chapter near the end of the book that belittles Instapoetry and Instapoets. In the introduction, Knox and Mackay argue that “serious examination of Instapoetry as a literary phenomenon is long overdue” (7), an argument I’ve made extensively myself (Obbard). So, why include a chapter that claims Instapoets “‘rattle off’ poems without stopping to think, as if by mechanical function rather than poetic prowess” (145), as Ryan Prewitt and Max Accardi argue in chapter ten, “Poetry-by-Numbers: Machine-Generating Instapoetry”?

In this chapter, the authors create an algorithm to generate Instapoems, which they claim are more nuanced than most Instapoetry. With the increasing popularity of AI and GenAI, the argument that computers can write better poetry than Instapoets seems to be gaining traction. Some would argue that critiques of Instapoetry, such as those I’ve outlined above, still count as taking Instapoetry seriously. However, as several chapters in this collection articulate, the argument that Instapoetry is amateurish or lacking literary value has led to the denigration within academia and beyond of both the genre and scholarship on Instapoetry (Obbard). In a book in which scholars, writers, and practitioners are asking deep, important questions about Instapoetry, it is disappointing to see a chapter push the supposed ‘fact’ that Instapoetry lacks craft. The presumed argument that all Instapoetry is “bad,” unliterary, amateur, or lacking craft simply because some Instapoetry is short and relatable detracts from meaningful and important conversations on the larger effect Instapoetry has and is having—conversations that the rest of the collection emphasizes. Locating this chapter near the end of the collection (the tenth chapter out of thirteen) reveals that the chapter does not engage either with deeper scholarly conversations on Instapoetry, or with the preceding chapters. Indeed, the placement of the chapter further weakens the authors’ argument since the reader has already been presented with much more nuanced accounts of Instapoetry’s value.

Establishing the value of Instapoetry Scholarship

Overall, however, the collection presents important work that seeks to resist, push back against, and deny the line of argument that Instapoetry is undeserving of literary study and lacks literary value. The volume invites us to reconsider what counts as poetry in the digital era and dives deeply into questions of the intersections of platforms, algorithms, and publishing, barriers to social media data access, and the complexity of how marginalized voices operate on Instagram. It provides a solid overview of the Instapoetry phenomenon and achieves its goal of bringing together diverse perspectives and theoretical frameworks on Instapoetry. Specifically, the collection excels at balancing poetic and practitioner contributions with critical scholarship, merging various voices of importance in the field. This hybridity mirrors Instapoetry’s own hybridity, allowing readers to appreciate aesthetic and poetic strategies while also probing platform economies, algorithmic mediation, and identity politics. As academic engagement with Instapoetry and social media literature matures, this collection will remain foundational.

Works Cited

Adler, Lindsay. “Instagram Poet Rupi Kaur Seems Utterly Uninterested in Reading Books.” Deadspin, 4 Oct. 2017, https://deadspin.com/instagram-poet-rupi-kaur-seems-utterly-uninterested-in-1819153164.

Ali, Kazim. “On Instafame & Reading Rupi Kaur.” Text/html. Poetry Foundation, 25 Mar. 2024, https://doi.org/10/on-rupi-kaur. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.

Mackay, James, and JuEunhae Knox, editors. Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. Electronic Literature, vol 4, https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/reading-instapoetry-9798765105481/.

Obbard, Kiera. The Instagram Effect: Contemporary Canadian Poetry Online. 2024. University of Guelph. atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca, https://hdl.handle.net/10214/28632.

Ramanathan, Lavanya. “From Instapoets to the Bards of YouTube, Poetry Is Going Viral. And Some Poets Hate That.” Washington Post, 6 May 2018. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/from-instapoets-to-the-bards-of-youtube-poetry-is-going-viral-and-some-poets-hate-that/2018/05/06/ea4240fa-4329-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html.

Roberts, Soraya. “No Filter.” The Baffler, 24 Jan. 2018,https://thebaffler.com/latest/instapoetry-roberts. Tagging and Mentions | Instagram Help Center.https://help.instagram.com/627963287377328/?helpref=hc_fnav. Accessed 27 Aug. 2025.

Watts, Rebecca. “The Cult of the Noble Amateur.” PN Review 239, vol. 44, no. 3, Feb. 2018, pp. 13–17. Yuan, Karen, and Faith Hill. “How Instagram Saved Poetry.” The Atlantic, 15 Oct. 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/rupi-kaur-instagram-poet-entrepreneur/572746/.