Poetry is a living art, and among living poets there has been a party divide created by the likes of a prominent social media platform: Instagram. This assumed conflict isn't between old and new poets. It's not even between publishing houses and Instagram. Rather, it's between tradition and the lack thereof. It’s between the genre gatekeepers and the rebels.

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Before stepping into the battlefield of conflict, let’s first understand how these two parties are similar:

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• They’re undeniably popular. Both have their own sets of following, one being readers of modern living contemporary poets with published collections, and the other a subset of the one billion users of Instagram: laymen scrolling through their curated feeds and seeking the satisfaction, the joy, the thrill of a poem that resonates with them.

• Both have minor and major figures: the staple household names, and smaller writers with their niche fan bases.

• Both look to push the boundaries of their predecessors. For modern classical poetry, that means challenging predecessors in theme, discussing topics such as the gender and identity, depression and suicide, modern day immigration, or LGBTQ challenges. For Instapoets, it means reshaping the approach to how poetry is written and consumed: refraining from complex language, keeping the lengths of works short, and by nature of the platform, aspiring to be as relatable to as wide an audience as possible.

• They are both writing poems: literary work in the distinctive style of stacked lines in stanzas, written with the intention of expressing feelings and ideas, often pulling on literary elements such as simile, juxtaposition, irony, personification.

• They are both poetic. At the end of the day, it’s poetry they’re writing. It carries the artistic elements that encourage readers to feel. It lives in metaphor, and breathes inspiration. Whether Instapoetry fits the mold of poetry in definition is an ongoing debate, but both parties are undeniably poetic.

 

The way I would define modern classical poetry, assisted by poet Sumita Chakraborty, is by the works of Diana Khoi Nguyen, Fatima Azghar, Danez Smith, and Ilya Kaminsky. Poetry written on paper and found in the bindings of books. Works written by living poets whose work is informed by traditions of classically-trained poetry; perhaps not classical in and of itself, but rather, cognizant of and rooted in classical poetry. Works that stay true to the pillars, tools and features of classically trained poetry, that challenge its predecessors in modern themes and in book design. Culturally, they are works that likely look to identify closer to the poems of Robert Frost than Rupi Kaur.

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Instagram poetry, coined Instapoetry, is a rather straightforward title: poetry written in posts and subsequently posted on Instagram. There are hundreds of accounts dedicated solely to posting original work, or reposting the works of others. Award-winning Instagram poets r.h. Sin, Hollie McNish, Amanda Lovelace, Lang Leav, Pierre Alex Jeanty and Rupi Kaur have made poetry more accessible, simpler, and more digestible. It has allowed the genre to reach more people, and not fret about unfamiliarity with the genre. But as social media gets increasingly popular, classical poetry has been diluted - perhaps muted - and has thus sparked such great controversy. The muting of classical poetry has muted the poetic elements that poets use to create rhythm, to juxtapose, to draw metaphor, to create layers of emotion, to tell a story. Instagram poetry could be viewed as watered-down, or simply aphorisms and cliche sentiments to achieve its goals of relatability, aesthetic, and brevity.

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While these contrasts are certainly powerful, both platforms receive their due adulation, their own followings, their respective fan bases. Why must modern classical poets fret about the Instapoetry movement? Perhaps Instapoetry is just too accessible.

 

Works like Cruz’s above requires analysis, consideration of Hispanic culture and conquistadors, and pulls on various emotions. It plays with rhythm and offers 8 stanzas. Kaur’s is certainly poetic, is direct in nature and offers irony. It achieves the emotional pull from her audience - in fact, her loyal fan base has been moved enough to go as far as inking tattoos of these very works. However, it stands as a single phrase, and offers 1 stanza. Its meaning is written onto the page, without needing any nuance of greater context.

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The rooted point of differentiation between both works, and both platforms, is accessibility. There are no gatekeepers to Instapoetry; if you can make an account and read, you are likely eligible to wholly enjoy the works put out by Instapoets. However, as noted by poet Raymond McDaniel, modern classical poetry is different. There are gatekeepers to even accessing those very poems: writers must get past publishing houses and compete for bookstore shelf real estate, and their readers must purchase collections with their disposable income.

 

Beyond the notion of literal accessibility, there is literate accessibility as well. The prerequisite to reading Kaur’s work is a straightforward vocabulary, and it doesn’t call for deep analysis. However, Cruz’s is quite the opposite. The people who can get to the bottom of Cruz’s work, those willing to put in the analysis and earn its greater meaning, is certainly a smaller pool. Thus, the root of this accessibility contrast, and the debate itself, is elitism. The debate, at its core, is simply a reputational conflict. 

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Publications as large as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have covered this deliberation. Critics and fans alike erupted when Milk and Honey and Amanda Lovelace’s books began selling record copies of their collections.

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Rebecca Watts, a prize-shortlisted poet, was supposed to review Kaur’s two books for PN Review, a poetry journal, but she opted for an essay in which she wrote, “the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’ – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft.” She also refused to review Hollie McNish’s book, Plum, saying that “to do so … would imply that it deserves to be taken seriously as poetry.”

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Criticism also largely dominates the open review forum, GoodReads, for most of the aforementioned Instagram poets. Below, I’ll include the top review from Amanda Lovelace’s best seller, The Princess Saves Herself in This One - a review that grossed thousands of likes from fellow reviewers:

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“hitting

enter

after

every

word

does

not

make

it

poetry.

 

Or maybe it does these days. Between the highly praised Lang Leav and this latest GoodReads Choice finalist, I guess these emo Tumblr quotes are the modern version of poetry.

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Call me old school, but I kind of expect something more. Some of these sentences are nice, sure, and some of them tickle the inner emo that lives inside us all, the one that occasionally makes us stay up late sobbing over Elliott Smith songs (oh wait, that's just me?) but come on, is this really the best we have to offer up nowadays? At a time when we just lost the wonderful Leonard Cohen, I can't help feeling sad at the direction poetry is moving in.

 

Consider these by Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

 

Now I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

But you don't really care for music, do you?

It goes like this

The fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

 

And then this:

the princess

jumped from

the tower

& she

learned

that she

could fly

all along.

 

How is that even a poem? It's just a badly-punctuated sentence that sounds kinda cool. Put it in a pretty cursive font and it would get so many reblogs on tumblr.”

 

But there is also praise. The New York Times acknowledged the genre’s audience backlash, and stood up for Kaur:

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“The underlying message of all this criticism is that Ms. Kaur’s work isn’t ‘real literature.’ The literary world doesn’t have a great track record of embracing or even acknowledging artists like Ms. Kaur, who are different in some notable way, but who attract an enormous and fervent audience.

 

This dynamic has cropped up recently with the writers Lang Leav (with whom Ms. Kaur shares a publisher) and Tao Lin. Like a Kathy Acker or even a Patti Smith before them, these writers also weren’t seen as important, largely because of their too-youthful or too-female readership.

 

‘Critics might think that Kaur’s readership is young and female, so her work can’t be serious, which is obviously wrong,’ said Matthew Hart, a professor of English and comparative literature Columbia University. ‘Her style doesn’t seem naïve.’”

 

And the Wall Street Journal has reported on the phenomenon of Instapoets, deeming them today’s era of poetry, following eras of Shakespeare, then Longfellow, then Marianne Moore, then T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes. While the merits of Instapoetry are hotly debated, there is consensus on its domineering existence, and the level of accessibility it brings.

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The fundamental question is whether or not poetry can be for anyone: who is and isn’t allowed to read poetry? Words by Romy, however, is suspect of this divide.

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I've been on both sides of this debate. I've read works on both sides, and have carried a notion of skepticism reading about the chasm in this modern genre. Opacity for the sake of opacity is artificial, and this platform will look to create neutral grounds for both, and celebrate the merits of what both parties have to offer. Consider Words by Romy a devil’s advocate, or a new breath of air, that revisits form and tradition.