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Elfen Lied - エルフェンリート

Breaking down Instapoetry

Whether you love or hate the style of modern poetry that Rupi Kaur is often cited as popularizing, it is clear that it has been impactful on the poetry community and that it has its own rules despite how things may appear.

If you went to school for creative writing and English lit like I did, it might be easy to handwave away this genre, but over the course of my attempting to parody the style, I have gained a certain appreciation for it and I certainly see the potential despite my criticisms.

Here's 8 characteristics that kept appearing:

Written in non-rhyming verse

Written in fewer than 20 words

Used no capitalization or punctuation

Minimal use of rhyme, meter, alliteration, metaphor, image, and figurative language

Weirdly enjambed lines

Uses universal/vernacular language

Written straightforwardly, requiring little to no interpretation

Includes some illustrations

I had to follow these as rules when approaching my own attempts at the genre because it meant unlearning what nearly a decade of academia and the poetry community had taught me. Here are some more generalities that helped guide my themes:

Blunt and confessional tone with familiar cliches

"Hashtag titles" (when the title is at the end of the poem)

Discussion of mental health, toxic relationships, violence/harassment against women

"Self-help aesthetic" revolving around self-love, empowerment, trauma recovery, and personal development

Focus on issues of social justice, identity politics, rebellion or resistance to social oppression, with particular attention to the concerns of women and minorities

Using similar themes/word ideas multiple times throughout the collection

Speaks directly to the reader or using first-person perspective

Sprinkling in of prose poetry

The erasure of "i" when possible

Feels like you're reading someone's diary

Criticisms of the genre include that instapoetry is over-commercialized, is instant gratification, and lacking in "art." It could be argued that the poetry community is just being pompous and elitist (I certainly have my moments), and that this style of poetry allows for those not educated in poetry to explore it and to be more open to minority groups. Like many aspects of society, poetry was an artform dominated by white, cis, straight men and this allows for more diversity through leaving traditional publishing behind and sending your poetry right to the people.

Having played around in the genre for awhile now, I'm of two minds. For me, poetry has always been more sensual and visceral than prose, focusing less on abstraction and more on imagery (imagery doesn't have to just mean sight, but all the senses). Poetry is about describing the sunset in order to show the feeling of love as warm, comforting, and beautiful instead of bluntly stating "love is warm, comforting, and beautiful." Poetry breaks down words to their essential parts to create rhythm, tempo, and flow and uses all the literary devices in the box to make that happen. From the grammar, to the stanza and line length, to the diction, to the figures of speech all serves the imagery. Many of the books I read in my research of the genre did not use imagery. There were no sensory images to think over. With this idea of what poetry is in my head, it's hard to classify some instapoetry as poetry. That doesn't mean I don't think the words written aren't valid just that it might not be poetry, often reading more like peeking into someone's diary or posts on r/showerthoughts. There is also the added downside to self-publishing in that it often seems poets don't employ an editor which can take a reader out of the words when they come across typos, or the poems don't flow into one another.

One thing that the genre does do very well is the messy self-evisceration of the poets writing themselves. You truly feel like you are connecting to these poets in a way I don’t often feel in traditional genres of poetry. The line blurs between the writer and the “speaker” of the poem we’re all taught about in poetry class. So whether the poet is a famous actress, YouTuber, or some guy you’ve never heard of, it feels as if you’re peering into their soul. I didn’t always like these peers into personal voids, but I can’t deny that they evoked something within me. Whether these evoked feelings that the poets intended is a whole other story. Whether it was Megan Fox messily and aggressively baring her soul about domestic abuse, Trisha Paytas disjointedly telling us about the connections between spaghetti and “being a whore”, amie james’ relatable string of self-deprecation, R.H. Sin thinking “everything” a woman can give is sex, wanting Michael Faudet to just write the smut he clearly wants to, seeing Amanda Lovelace process her complicated relationship with her deceased mother, seeing Parker Lee grow in discovering her identity as a transwoman and find love in her sickeningly sweet romance with Lovelace, Gabbie Hanna...do whatever the hell that was, and so many others, I may have cringed here and there, but I believe that though not every aspect of instapoetry is for me, I became a better reader and poet through reading these collections and trying to create my own.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll continue writing down this path, and break my own rules...and the rules of traditional poetry.