Instapoetry

Instapoetry is an aesthetic form that appeared after the advent of social media. This kind of poetry is written specifically to be shared on the Internet, most often on Instagram. It has a form of pictures of text or images with textual elements. As Camilla Holm (2021) points out, "while a lot of poetry on Instagram is simply images of poetry remediated on the social media, there also exists a type of platform literature, or platform poetry" that is generated in digital media and thus digital-born. Instapoems are short, catchy, emotionally charged, and their main goal is to make the audience read, feel and share. Instapoetry contains aesthetic and creative images that, unlike traditional poetry, do not function as illustrations, but are an important part of the poetic aesthetic.
According to Kathi Inman Berens (2018), as an artform, Instapoetry tends to be semantically simple, as its language is close to the spoken word, and its main theme is intimacy and closeness. An important feature of Instapoetry is interaction with recipients, understood as a conversation composed of comments posted on a post.
Instapoetry is very democratic, as both publishing and receiving are possible for everyone who has access to the Internet. The motivation driving electronic poems, including Instapoetry, is "to invest a creativity that invites creativity, a poetry that generates not just more poems but more poets" (Evens, 2017, p. 235). María Goicoechea de Jorge (2022, p. 12) notes that artists who use Instagram to publish their work "are aware of the commercial objectives of the platforms and try to skew or appropriate them, depending on their own intentions." The authors' attitude to profit and their awareness of the functioning of algorithms are therefore factors that may affect the final shape of the work, as well as the democratic tendency of the digital art.

References:
Berens Inman, K. 2018. Instapoetry Matters. Issues in Social Media for the Arts. https://www.narrabase.net/kathi_berens.html
Evens A., 2017. Combination and Copulation: Making Lots of Little Poems. In J. Tabbi (Ed.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. (pp. 217-236). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Goicoechea de Jorge, M. 2022. The Art Object in a Post-Digital World: Some Artistic Tendencies in the Use of Instagram. electronic book review.
Holm C., 2021. Approaching the world of an instapoem. SLSAeu Conference 2021: Literary and Aesthetic Posthumanism, 4 & 5 March 2021, Bergen.

(authored by Patrycja Pankau)