Bruno Cooke looks at three poets who successfully integrate social media into their poetic method: Georgie Jones, Darby Hudson and Brian Bilston
If I ask you to hold the words ‘Instagram’ and ‘poet’ in your head, who springs to mind? Do the swirls and burbles of your inner eye by any chance coalesce around the image of a certain Punjabi Canadian poet?
Rupi Kaur is – or was – the Instapoet par excellence, synonymous even with the idea of an Instagram poet. Her reach is astounding: she sells books in “airport novel numbers, not poetry ones” (New York Times) and has 4.5 million followers on Instagram. That’s about 400,000 more than Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister. People interact with her work in numbers most poets daren’t even dream of, and not only in the form of ‘likes’. Kaur’s poetry genuinely touches people, including many who aren’t regular poetry readers. Her debut collection, Milk and Honey (2015), is available in more than thirty-five languages. And, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ll probably be familiar with the polemics her writing – or rather her success – has inspired.
In 2019, author Rumaan Alam of The New Republic named Kaur ‘writer of the decade’, prompting backlash from people who, for whatever reason, disagree. But Alam didn’t bestow this title because he liked her writing style. Likewise, I’m not here to talk about the quality of her poetry. I’m interested in the way she interacts with her medium, and in the poets finding success in her wake.
Kaur’s significance, Alam argues, inheres in the way she ‘predicts’ something about the future of poetry. “She’s made a huge success with work that is really attuned to the surface of the screen”, he said during an interview with CBC News. Her writing works, at least in part, because of the way it utilises its medium. This is true of all art forms, but remarkable now because of the way mediation is changing. Traditional poetry ‘knows’ it belongs on paper, and has to bend to the constraints of, for example, 2D-ness, portrait orientation, and spatial limitations. The first step to understanding Kaur’s success, however, is recognising that her medium isn’t paper. It’s not even the printed word. “She is predicting a way of thinking about screen surface,” Alam says, adding that while many of the 21st century’s most celebrated writers “write in direct opposition to the pervasive influence of the Internet”, Kaur embraces it. For her – and a small group of poets I’ll get to in a minute – the Internet is a rideable wave, not an obstacle to creativity or an inconvenient, unromantic backdrop.
For Rupi Kaur the Internet is a rideable wave, not an obstacle to creativity or an inconvenient, unromantic backdrop
Alam suggests that resistance to Kaur (and her ilk) springs from scepticism towards art’s increasing dependence on technology. “It feels suspect,” he says, “because we’re still hostage to this romantic ideal of a poet with a scroll and a quill in the cold attic somewhere, and that’s not how it is anymore.” Maybe she wouldn’t have found the same level of success in a world without social media, but social media exists. The lesson to be learned is that you – we – may as well use it to advantage.
Of course it’s not just Rupi Kaur. There are other poets for whom networks like Instagram, TikTok and X offer not only a dissemination route but also an essential part of their method, who have built social media into their personae and practice. Depending on how up to date you are with the ways social media is changing, you might be able to predict the direction of today’s Instapoetry and its practitioners. Kaur found success in the mid 2010s, when Instagram was primarily a place for sharing square-shaped still images. Then TikTok came along, and its popularity led Instagram to introduce ‘reels’ (short form video content) in 2020. Meaning: the successful embrace of Instagram – as a medium – looks different now. Short form, illustrated textual poetry won’t cut it.
Many poets have already cracked the art of social media integration. Here are three examples: Georgie Jones, Darby Hudson and Brian Bilston.
Georgie Jones
Georgie Jones (@georgie_jonez) lives in north London. She spent a year as a Roundhouse Resident Artist, and is one quarter of musical comedy troupe Just These Please. She doesn’t use X because it “kinda scares” her, but she’s amassed a following of 115,000 on TikTok and nearly 12,000 on Instagram, mostly by posting videos in which she performs with a soft smile and confessional style directly to camera. She knows her poems by heart, too, which enables her to ‘read’ as if words were simply floating out of her.
Like Rupi Kaur, Jones writes in an intimate and personal way. She uses accessible language. She talks about everyday things. Love, relationships and feminine identity are recurring themes. But the poetry itself is nothing like Kaur’s, and her method of delivery is very different. Nor is she the kind of poet you imagine when you think of ‘spoken word poets’ or ‘performance poets’. Jones records her videos in a domestic setting, as if inviting you into her home. Her aesthetic is very hygge: woolly cardigans, patterned knitwear and denim dungarees. You’ll often find her holding a pastel-coloured mug of tea. Her blue eyes and curly blonde hair exude warmth. The absence of a live audience means she doesn’t have to project her voice. She can perform quietly and comfortably, and she doesn’t have to make eye contact with everyone in the room. Because there’s only one person in the room. You.
Her aesthetic is very hygge: woolly cardigans, patterned knitwear and denim dungarees
Is there method here? There has to be. Her work involves set design, costume and direction. You have to appease the algorithm somehow, just as poets writing for brick and mortar bookshops, literary agents and legacy publishers must please their gatekeepers. But her ‘vibe’, for want of a better word, is authentic. She writes relatable, accessible prose poems – there’s no undue cleverness of form to give people the ick – delivers them with heart, grace and a twinkling smile, and it works for her because that’s what works in her medium of choice. The average person scrolling through TikTok and Instagram isn’t looking for poetry, so the emotive charge of the communication has to work to appeal to them.
Jones’ most popular video, posted in October 2020, has been viewed 184,000 times (and counting). She’s since launched a Substack newsletter and translated her online success into an offline ‘supper club’ in Peckham. It sold out during its first outing.
Darby Hudson
The first time I came across Darby Hudson’s work, while scrolling through Instagram, I was mesmerised. He presents as endearingly scruffy, with unkempt hair and loose-fitting knitwear – he always wears the same cream-coloured jumper (costume), which gives the illusion that he’s recorded all his videos in one sitting. The consistency is kind of comforting.
As he reads his poems, his head lolls from side to side, eyes alternating from two seemingly fixed points behind the camera (direction). He speaks conversationally, in a soft Australian monotone. Each poem takes the shape of an elongated sigh, his delivery falling somewhere between plaintive and wistful: a wry lament. The collection he has been promoting is called Working Nine Lives, and it’s about what Hudson calls the “cult of nine-to-five”, so it’s only fitting that he should sound fed up. He refers to his poems as “sideways brain-monkeys”, and the thing that he does with them “crapping on”. Behind him, in almost every video, is a climbing frame for a cat (set).
His videos have a meditative quality that sets him apart from poets like Georgie Jones. He’s deliberately aloof and detached; he never makes eye contact. The sideways motion of his head feels like the gentle swing of a hammock or the pendulous back-and-forth of a rocking chair. It didn’t occur to me when I first came across him, but he’s actually reading his poems from a script located somewhere behind the camera. You can just make out his eye movements flitting from line to line, but it’s fairly well masked. And the overall impression is dreamy and surreal, rather than lazy.
The sideways motion of his head feels like the gentle swing of a hammock or the pendulous back-and-forth of a rocking chair
Like Jones, his style is conversational, but each video – each ‘reel’ – is a performance. Appearance, clothing and delivery are all staged and directed, if only by him. He’s studied the medium, he’s sensitive to its unique criteria. And so – as far as his social media persona is concerned – he’s neither page poet nor spoken word artist. Of course, he could have set up a camera and recorded a traditional poetry reading, and posted those videos online, as could Georgie Jones. Doing so would have preserved their identity as traditional page poets. But rather than see TikTok and Instagram (and the Internet at large) as somehow poetry-averse, or as a featureless vehicle for current work, they chose to regard them as a rideable wave.
The videos of Jones and Hudson are minute-long performances crafted for screen, designed to be stumbled upon by those who occasionally spend half an hour flicking through videos on Instagram or TikTok. And these dreamy reflections, delivered in Hudson’s dreary monotone or with Jones’ warmly welcoming twinkle, are a welcome antidote to the frenzy of stimulation that social media algorithms tend to promote.
Darby Hudson currently has 85,000 followers on Instagram and 52,000 on TikTok. The video embedded above has been viewed nearly half a million times.
Brian Bilston
So far I’ve focused on poets who (in Rupi Kaur’s wake) have adapted to the changing landscape of social media by adopting carefully crafted personae and producing portrait-orientated short videos of their poems. But there’s another exploitable feature of social media, which has less to do with sight, sound and the different forms digital art can take, and more to do with time. The Internet is everything, everywhere, all at once; immediacy is inbuilt. And in this regard, I would be remiss not to mention Brian Bilston, described by The Irish Times as the “poet laureate of Twitter” and by Pan Macmillan as “the Banksy of the poetry world”, because his use of X (formerly Twitter) permits a kind of timeliness and topicality unavailable to many page poets.
Bilston (a pseudonym) joined Twitter “to not feel so stupid at work”. After a couple of years, he started using the platform to “play around with words and have some fun”. He soon found immense success with his irreverent, witty poems. Even more importantly, they were time-relevant. While it’s not uncommon for poets to write and share something for World Poetry Day (21 March), Bilston’s practice was to publish (or rather ‘post’) ‘An Extra Day’ on 29 February, ‘The Caveman’s Lament’ on Valentine’s Day, a little ditty called ‘Selected Early Writings of the Poets’ a few days earlier (see below), and the charming ‘Mnemonic’ (about how January can feel unduly long) in late January. All this as well as others offering a quick-witted take on current events.
Posting his poems as images makes them more easily shareable. Timing them so that they’re relevant makes sharing them more fun
Posting his poems as images makes them more easily shareable. Timing them so that they’re relevant makes sharing them more fun. Individual poems may only garner a light chuckle, but for many people, that’s basically the point of using social media. Bilston is a viral poet – and a page poet too, but on X, he’s an X poet, just as Georgie Jones is a TikTok poet (TikToet?) and Darby Hudson is an Instapoet.
There are others, too. I recently came across Dan Whitlam, a poet from South London whose stylised readings, often set to an instrumental backing track (he also plays piano), have earned him a substantial Instagram following. Hollie McNish, author of Slug (reviewed by The Friday Poem here), also tailors output to be more Instagram-friendly, although not to the same extent as poets discussed here. And that’s without setting foot outside the anglophone world, or even swimming across the pond.
Change can be exhausting to keep up with, and during periods of flux it’s tempting to lean on traditional modes of artistic expression, to regard gatekept legacy media as safe and reliable. But creativity doesn’t sit still. Nor do books have a monopoly on poetry. Poets can benefit from casting a wider net. It takes originality and versatility to successfully work around gatekeepers. As for readers – shouldn’t we allow ourselves to be drawn towards originality and flair? Of all flavours?
