Published In

Reading #Instapoetry: A Poetics of Instagram

ISBN

9798765105511

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

6-24-2024

Subjects

Instagram (Electronic resource), Digital Humanities, Poetry

Abstract

Preface

A lot has happened in the world, and in e-literature, since my essay débuted as a conference presentation then a publication in electronic book review in 2018. Global protests against the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor during the pandemic summer of 2020 sparked reckoning with how banal, mainstream, and lethal is white supremacy. Six months later, in response to specific critiques about access and equity inside the Electronic Literature Organization, its Board of Directors published a statement about Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) as a core value. As an editor of the Electronic Literature Collective Volume 4, I can attest that we centered EDI in our search for and evaluation of works to include in the fourth installment of the field’s canonical anthology. In “Excavating Logics of White Supremacy in Electronic Literature: Antiracism as Infrastructural Critique,” Ryan Ikeda shares his experience of searching the ELMCIP database for “‘critical race theory,’ ‘Black feminism’ and ‘Asian American studies’—all of which yielded zero results.” As a cultural act, “these serialized zeroes affirmed an all-too-familiar affective state …. Care and community building begin by organizing the symbolic structures of an institution to reflect its constituents” (2021).

The history of exclusion is Instapoetry’s foundational moment. Instapoetry began with two immigrant, millennial women of color, Rupi Kaur and Lang Leav, selling directly to social media publics circa 2014 after having been repeatedly rejected by publishing house acquisitions editors. Today, Instapoetry’s community of makers is too broad and diffuse to generalize about whether its practitioners “critically engage” readers, or otherwise meet the aesthetic standards articulated by editors in four volumes of the Electronic Literature Collection. But that 16shouldn’t stop us from taking a keen interest in Instapoetry’s field development. It has morphed from the feminism of Kaur and Leav to that of Noor Unnahar (@noor_unnahar) and the humorous Arti Gollapudi (@artifartypoems) and Aly Dixon (@aly__dixon). Sylvia Castelán (@ 🌹🌹🌹) and Liliana Vasques (@robot_sorridente [smiling_robot]) use the Instagram platform for wry self-expression rather than as springboards to book sales. The field is now distributed rather than centralized in a few hit makers, though Andrews McMeel Publishing remains the preeminent publisher of printed Instapoetry. Robert M. Drake (@rmdrk) and Reuben Holmes (@r.h.sin), both men of color, female-affirming, and self-published, have attained New York Times bestseller status.

Instapoetry gives agency to poets typically shut out of prestige economies such as book publishing and academia. Without gigantic social media response in 2014, and thousands of self-published book sales, publishers wouldn’t have taken a chance on Instapoetry. Rupi Kaur doesn’t code her Instapoems—that option exists for no one. But in 2014 Kaur wrote, edited, and hand-built the design of her first book, milk and honey, as an end-run around gatekeeping poetry publishers. This exactly the kind of digital self-agency the ELO EDI statement is meant to acknowledge and invite. Those of us who read the code of an e-lit work alongside its user interface find the experience of reading e-lit published in social media flat. Shorn of its code, a work can feel like just a fragment.

Although most readers may not think of it this way, to buy a printed volume of Instapoetry is to buy the entire meaning-making apparatus. It is a contestatory act, owning a book and doing with it what you will. Read and share the book without being tracked. Browsing and preferences are the mother lode of an individual’s value to media platforms, which harvest one’s data in exchange for serving algorithmically customized content for “free.” Harvard Business School Professor Emerita Shoshana Zuboff calls this “surveillance capitalism”: the commodification of personal data for the sole purpose of profit-making (2020: v). Users of social media have no idea whether giving away their browsing data in exchange for more relevant search returns is a fair exchange because no regulatory body has compelled media companies to disclose the value of the information, or give people the ability to opt out. Want to pay a subscription fee to stop the collection of your data? That option doesn’t exist. The richest and most powerful global companies trade human-derived commodities mostly free from regulatory constraint. It’s immoral.

In the context of limitless data surveillance, one printed copy of Rupi Kaur’s third volume of poetry, Home Body, is a bargain. For just $7.48 you can have a private Instapoetry reading experience because Kaur’s publisher, Andrews 17McMeel, overestimated demand; the book is remaindered. Imagine! Private reading discounted 50 percent.

Eugenio Tisselli and Rui Torres believe that “being peripheral may actually be the role of e-literature. To critically engage from the inside of a system is to guarantee that readers are not passive or merely entertained watchers.” Critical awareness and resistance are excellent cultural contributions. So are access, inclusion, and community. This chapter is one exploration of the tensions between those things in Instapoetry.

Rights

Copyright © Kathi Berens. Editors © James Mackay and JuEunhae Knox 2024. This chapter is published open access subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). You may re-use, distribute, and reproduce this work in any medium for noncommercial purposes, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence.

DOI

10.5040/9798765105511.ch-1

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42384

Download

Share

COinS