Bruno Cooke talks to Georgie Jones, the poet who found success by posting her work on Instagram and TikTok
BC: Georgie Jones (@georgie_jonez) is a poet – originally from the Midlands but living in London – who posts her work on Instagram and TikTok. I met her for the first time about a decade ago while studying in Mile End, and recently caught up with her for a chat. Georgie, how did you first start writing poetry?
GJ: In my final year of uni, I opted in for the Practice Based Research Project so that I could opt out of The Big Scary Dissertation Writing Project. My practice-based research was into the ‘performance of spectacle’, and it culminated in sharing two versions of the same poem – one with all the expected theatrical accoutrements (lighting design, hair and makeup, sound design, costume, etc) and one without. We needn’t delve too much further into the specifics, but all of this is to say, I had a poem. A poem with which I entered the Roundhouse Poetry Slam. After competing in the final I joined the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, then spent a year as Roundhouse Resident Artist. It’s all very Roundhouse-centric, isn’t it? But that’s really where I cut my teeth.
BC: Did you originally think of yourself as a page poet, or did you always see social media as a tool you wanted to integrate into your creative writing practice?
GJ: It’s funny, I never thought of myself as a poet, of any kind. Maybe that’s a silly thing to say, but as one of those multi-hyphen people – y’know, I am a performer / poet / whatever – I felt like I could only claim to be the thing I’d most recently done. I was consistently a barista, and in the days before and after a comedy show I was a sketch comedian. In the days either side of a slam, I was a poet. In the in-between, I was profusely apologising, unsure of how to define myself. But putting stuff online kind of challenges that, because you develop a brand. People will look at your page and want to know quickly what you’re about.
I started regularly posting poetry on social media in 2020. In the weeks before lockdown, gigs were getting cancelled and shows were being postponed indefinitely. I was supposed to do a UK tour of my one-woman spoken word show and I was getting emails from the venues one by one like ‘uhhh we might have to press pause on this for a little while’. So social media wasn’t so much a tool I consciously integrated into my practice as a way to keep performing when the world shut down.
BC: Are there poets working in the same digital space as you whose work you would recommend to readers of The Friday Poem?
GJ: I must confess, I don’t follow a lot of poetry accounts online. Is that quite a blasphemous thing to say? Maybe it is. My feed is a carefully curated stream of makeup tutorials I will never attempt, gorgeous interiors, and people I’ve never met telling me what they eat in a day.
I must confess, I don’t follow a lot of poetry accounts online. Is that quite a blasphemous thing to say?
I have a mountain of poetry books in my room. That’s probably not the correct collective noun for poetry books, it should be something much more literary, right? Like a library. I’m completely obsessed with everything Olivia Gatwood writes. Same goes for Kim Addonizio. I love Kate Baer and Sophia Thakur and Caleb Femi and Rachel Long and Yomi Sode. I have spent hours on YouTube and will no doubt spend many more watching Polar Bear and Dizraeli perform the same sets over and over and over again, total masters of their craft.
If I’m consuming poetry via social media, it’s likely I’ll be obsessing over Victoria (@thedailyvictorian) who recites her poetry while doing yoga in beautiful warm sunlight. I find it incredibly calming. Lyndsay Rush (@maryoliversdrunkcousin) writes with abundant humour, as does musical comedian Cat Cohen (@catcohen).
BC: Now that you’ve reached a position where you have followers and readers, do you have any particular goal in mind?
GJ: I’m just having a really nice time at the moment. I feel incredibly lucky to have carved out a small corner of the internet where everyone is really lovely. I think I’ve had maybe four hateful comments ever?! The plan for the moment is to keep having a really nice time without ulterior motives. I’m so guilty of saying yes to everything and then sitting in the stress of those commitments, wishing I’d taken on a little bit less. This year I challenged myself to slow down, to be more selective with the projects I give my time to, enabling me to enjoy it all more. Gotta say, so far so good.
BC: Does your success with social media generate an income, and to what extent is that a motivating factor with what you do?
GJ: In a word, no. I’d love to know how people make money from social media. I don’t know how anyone makes it work as a full time gig. I’m assuming the income comes predominantly from brand deals rather than uploading your own content but I couldn’t say for certain. I know that TikTok pays something like 0.02p for every thousand views, so I guess it’s possible to generate an income, but you’d need a whole lot of content and a whole lot of views.
BC: Do you have any hints, tips or advice for other poets/creatives who want to reach a bigger audience?
GJ: I wish I could be like ‘this is a formula that works if you’re looking to grow your audience’. But the truth is I haven’t got a clue. Some stuff does really well and some stuff just doesn’t strike a chord with people in the same way. I think consistency is important, and I try to share two poems a week. But when I’ve got lots on, I find it difficult to stick to that schedule, so I just don’t. Then I feel a kind of low simmering pressure, like ‘oh gahd I haven’t posted anything in 5 days!’
I wish I could be like ‘this is a formula that works if you’re looking to grow your audience’. But the truth is I haven’t got a clue
My advice, I suppose, would be to do it for yourself rather than for likes, views or followers. It’s easy to become beholden to social media. If you’re sharing a video hoping it will get 10,000 views and it gets 237, that can be really disheartening. And it doesn’t mean the work is bad, it just means the algorithm didn’t know what to do with it or something else was going viral at the same time.
I think it’s important to find joy in the process – in the writing and performing and editing and sharing – so that the views become almost irrelevant. Likes, shares and comments don’t dictate whether you’ve written a good or bad poem. Share the work you’re happy with or proud of. If it resonates with people, that’s a lovely little cherry on top.
BC: Who do you think of as your target audience?
GJ: I have always written for myself, and my pals. I imagine them as my audience online, and then sometimes I’ll get a direct message from a 50-something father of three in America, like ‘my wife and I were sobbing at your latest post’, and I’m like, oh wow. I write quite openly, I guess, about myself and my experiences and emotions. And the more personal you make something, the more universal it inherently becomes. The idea that anyone might relate to my little ramblings is wonderful.
BC: What are some of the more meaningful ways in which people have responded to your work?
GJ: I get gorgeous messages from people in response to my poetry. I read them all and try to respond to as many as I can. The process of writing can feel quite lonely at times, and certainly when I first began sharing work online, I felt like I was flinging stuff into the void. But storytelling is a means to form connections, and I am so touched whenever someone reaches out to say, ‘hey, me too, I felt that’. I am constantly dumbfounded by the kindness and generosity with which people respond to my stuff and, in turn, share parts of themselves with me.
BC: I caught wind of your Sunday Social Supper Club in January, and thought it looked like a lovely thing. How did the idea for it come about?
GJ: Thank you. If you’d ever like to come for dinner, we’d love to have you.
A lot of my work speaks to themes of platonic love. There was one piece in particular I shared and a lot of the comments were to do with how it made people feel nostalgic for something they’d never had, or didn’t know where to find. So I was like, okay, how do we facilitate a space where people can share parts of themselves and meet like minded people? I pitched the idea to my chef / food stylist friend Sian (and her dog, Stan) in a pub garden on one of the last warm-ish evenings of last year. Sian was in, as was Stan.
… storytelling is a means to form connections …
We hatched plans over white wine spritzers, estimated budgets and timeframes, and in the following days sent each other screenshots of napkins and serveware and tablescapes. We dreamt of these long tables with warm, twinkling lights and mellow music in the background, something we hoped would be the perfect setting for good conversation and the sharing of souls. And it was!
BC: How was it for you – did you perform?
GJ: The events really aren’t about me as a performer. I do a little ‘thanks for coming’ spiel at the beginning, but then we just sit and talk and eat together, and it’s lovely. It’s really important to Sian and me that everybody feels equal in the space – comfortable to share or not share, speak or not speak. So my role during the supper is to pose questions and keep the conversation flowing, but I definitely didn’t want to be The Poet; I didn’t want there to be moments where I’m like, ‘okay, quiet now, it’s time for me to perform’.
BC: This is something I wrote about in the piece we published a couple of weeks ago about your work on social media – establishing an aesthetic, speaking conversationally, etc – and I’d love to know more: what were the turning points that led to the way you deliver your poems online?
GJ: I was so interested in your interpretation of the videos! I was reading it like, ‘woah yeah I guess that is what I’m doing’, even if I’m not doing it intentionally. I love that you felt a real warmth and ‘hygge’ in there. I’d love for my profile to feel like a safe space for people, somewhere they can find comfort and feel seen.
I try to keep it all quite simple. Social media can be such a highlight reel, in that you’re never just watching someone bake banana bread, you’re watching them do it in a pristine kitchen with gorgeous lighting and top-of-the-range utensils. By contrast, I wanted my videos to have very little in them, to really be about the poetry and not about the background or the artwork on the walls or whatever. When I perform live, I like the show to feel really intimate. When I film content for social media, I’m trying to recreate that intimacy, like maybe we’re both sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, reminiscing and joking and putting the world to rights.
BC: Finally, has the role social media plays in your life changed since you found success on it?
GJ: Surprisingly, I spend a lot less time on social media than I used to. I guess social media apps (i.e. Instagram and TikTok) are now associated with working rather than switching my brain off, so I’ve found I’m less likely to absent-mindedly pick up my phone. Although, I must confess, if there’s time, it doesn’t get much better than an early night and a solid hour of intentional doomscrolling.
