| No Images? Click here   By Samantha Storey and Nick BaumannMaybe you need a break from political news. We sure do. Claire Fallon's story this week provided one. It's got everything: mystery, lies, secret identities ― and a whole lot of Instagram poetry drama. We asked her about it.How did this story come about? Last fall, my editor Katy Brooks and I were talking about how omnipresent poetry seemed to be on Twitter and Instagram ― some of it very good, like the Maggie Smith poem "Good Bones," and some of it quite cliché. I'm not a poetry expert, so I decided to report about this by interviewing lots of people who are; I talked to a number of acclaimed poets, popular Instagram poets, editors and booksellers. I expected the piece to engage with poetry's new wave of popularity pretty broadly, and I expected it to be a positive piece. Traditionally published poetry (through literary journals, major publishers, and so on) was seeing a big bump in attention, and Instagram offered this path to an audience for those who were not getting picked up by conventional publishers. Instead, one person I'd interviewed ― a poet who has been pretty widely covered for his satirical Instagram poetry account ― tipped his hand that he was working under a pseudonym. This led me to dig a bit more, and I discovered that there's a lot about the world of Instagram poetry that's pretty murky! What was the hardest part about reporting, writing or editing this piece? The hardest part, out of many hard parts, was deciding when to stop tugging on a thread. One aspect of the Instagram poetry world I started digging into was the existence of these tiny startup publishers that pop up for poets who have followings through Instagram. Atticus, a well-known Instagram poet who features in the piece, is published by Atria, a Simon & Schuster imprint, but earlier in his career he published a book with Underwater Mountains, an indie press that later folded amid accusations of financial misdeeds and sexual harassment. Scam presses, or just incompetently managed small presses, have existed for a long time, and they can take advantage of naive writers who just want to see their work in print. I also wanted to delve more into the gender and racial politics of the poetry scene on Instagram. It was hard not to just get tugged down a million different rabbit holes. What did you find that was most surprising? The big surprise was the one that led to the story in its current form: All these people using not just pseudonyms, but masks and false identities as a sort of leverage within the community. Instagram poetry has such a wholesome, positive image ― it's hand-lettered inspirational quotes, for the most part ― that it wasn't an arena where I expected to find so much trickery and bitter feuding. Do you think that instapoetry success almost requires a sort of huckster mentality? Or is it just particularly vulnerable to hucksters? Even after all this, I don't know if I can say for sure! It's possible that some people are genuine artists who are writing original things that people respond to, and it just happens to be on that platform. But I do think it's vulnerable to hucksters because it's treating poetry as a visual or lifestyle aesthetic rather than a linguistic art form, and that's a distorting force. Poets will succeed by offering a cohesive "look" to their posts, or by offering clichés that people can absorb quickly while scrolling through photos, or by crafting a persona that people want to embody or lust after, and they may be rewarded with book contracts or high Amazon sales. If you can brand yourself well enough, it doesn't really matter whether your work is original or thoughtful. I also think it's vulnerable because aside from fans, no one is paying much attention to this world. That said, traditional gatekeepers like publishing houses, journal editors, and critics aren't perfect antidotes ― artists have branded themselves ― and they carry their own biases. Why is this poetry so appealing to people? Obviously, as you note, the concepts are often banal and universal. But does the delivery mechanism make it more accessible? People love to see their own thoughts enshrined in art! It reminds me of those cheesy signs you might get at a souvenir shop that say "I'd rather be fishing" or "Is it wine o'clock yet?" ― a lot of people are going to respond to that by slapping their thigh and saying, "Hey, me too!" It feels good. Instagram is a special case, though. The delivery mechanism, for one thing, is getting poetry to lots of people who wouldn't be encountering it anywhere else. Not that many people buy books of poetry or subscribe to poetry journals. It's a visual medium, so people are encountering the words as if they have aesthetic value from the jump, whereas the same sentiment expressed in a tweet may not benefit from that presumption. And it's a limited format, so you can read a poem in just a few moments rather than having to click a link, or scroll through something. Poetry is often seen as very difficult to read and inaccessible; Instagram offers people poetry that they can absorb more passively. What do you want readers to take away? I want people to be thoughtfully engaged with what they read, whether it's a book or a magazine article or a poem posted on Instagram. It's okay to read Atticus, but I think it's always good to be a little skeptical, to ask questions about what you're consuming, and to push yourself as a reader. Love, |
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