Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram

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.

Author: James MacKay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 09/05/2024
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9798765105481

About the Author

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 an External Supervisor with the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK, currently examining AI-produced poems against Instapoetry practices. 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.