The phenomenally successful collection turns 10 this year. But let's call Instagram poets what they really are - influencers
The poet Rupi Kaur didn’t become famous through her words, but through her image. The 31-year-old Punjabi-Canadian, who now has four million followers on Instagram, grew her large following online after a photograph of her lying on her bed in loungewear, turned away from the camera, with period blood leaking onto her trousers and the sheets, went viral in 2015.
It was at the time that fourth-wave feminism was becoming mainstream online – and Kaur’s snappy poems, written to fit beautifully into an Instagram square, were in a similar vein. For millennials then in their late teens and early 20s, looking for new treasures on the ever-expanding internet, Kaur was golden. “your voice / is your sovereignty”, reads one of her aphorisms – appealing to staunch intersectionalists, corporate girlbosses and passionate royalists alike.
Donna Ashworth, a mother-of-two from Stirling, shot to success during the pandemic when she started posting her uplifting aphorisms on Instagram; last year, she sold 70,000 hardbacks. Whitney Hanson has released three books in as many years to sell to her three million Instagram followers and 2.5 million TikTok followers, to whom she also recites her work, staring into the camera with her cherubic face and what many of her fans call “the prettiest eyes in the world”.
Many people continue to argue that although, yes, Instagram poetry isn’t high literature, it’s a “gateway” for people to discover the work of – say it quietly – better writers. However, its sustained popularity as a form in its own right seems to suggest otherwise. Hanson’s page has more selfies of her than it does pictures of her work : as much as these poems provide some sort of emotional service to us, they provide evidence of women “living their truth”.
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