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Selfie‐Help: The Multimodal Appeal of Instagram

Poetry

Article in The Journal of Popular Culture · April 2019

DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12780

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Selfie-Help: The Multimodal Appeal of
Instagram Poetry

^ UET
L I L I P AQ

UNITED STATES POET LAUREATE, JUAN FELIPE HERRERA, HAS

F
ORMER
said, “A pen is different from the pad, the key, moving your
fingers across a screen. I like both, I like to work on sketch-
books, big old white sketch paper. I like how that feels, and I like to
put different media on it. Then there’s the phone, smartphone, iPad:
It’s the new page, and it’s not the same page anymore” (qtd. in Kel-
logg). Herrera draws precise distinctions between handwritten and
typed poetry, particularly when typed on a smartphone or iPad. Poets
who type their work directly into social networking sites such as
Instagram, perhaps from their smartphones, might be considered
embarrassingly amateurish compared to Herrera. However, Rupi
Kaur, arguably the most recognized of the current crop of Instagram
poets, has over three million followers on the site and has recently
published her second volume of poetry in print through Simon and
Schuster. As social media poets, such as Kaur, gain prominence, their
publications on Instagram are reshaping literary form and reaching
new audiences.
To date, academic scholarship has largely overlooked Instagram
poetry, usually considering it a lowbrow form that demonstrates little
literary merit. This response maintains binaries between academic
and popular culture and fails to consider the rhetorical importance of
audience reception. As a subgenre, Instagram poetry combines poetry
and self-help literature. Its validity, therefore, derives from its appeal
to poetic and broader audiences, and, as an artform, Instagram poetry
is further legitimized by the way in which its practitioners employ
poetic techniques of ekphrasis. Although they often appear trite, the

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 52, No. 2, 2019

© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

296
Selfie-Help 297

poetry sites and books of Rupi Kaur, as well as the sites of other
Instagram poets, such as Atticus, P a v a n a, and Alicia Cook,
demonstrate that academics should consider Instagram poetry a sig-
nificant subgenre because it is well suited to the medium and audi-
ence of Instagram and offers a self-help aesthetic that contrasts with
the superficiality of the social networking site.

Ekphrasis and Curating Authenticity

Instagram is a social networking site that might seem at first glance

ill-suited to an internalized and personal literary form such as poetry.
The network launched in 2010 as a smartphone app in which users
can take photographs on their phone cameras, apply filters through
the app, and share them with their followers to garner likes and com-
ments (Ridgway and Clayton 2). Users also describe their photographs
using hashtags in order to make them publically searchable. Insta-
gram is unique among social networking sites (hereafter SNS and
including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) for its focus on photog-
raphy, and, through this focus, it is also known for the prevalence of
selfies on the site. Selfies are self-portraits taken on smartphones and,
as described by Jessica Ridgway and Russell Clayton, “research has
shown narcissism, psychopathy, and insularity to be associated with
increased sharing of images of one’s self to SNSs. Additional research
posits, however, that SNSs help to empower users by serving as a plat-
form for self-representation” (3). Indeed, rather than view selfies solely
as a form of narcissism, one could also view them as a democratization
of celebrity through new global technologies. Toni Eagar and Stephen
Dann argue, “Individuals who were excluded from human-branding
performance because of the traditional media’s control of access to
production can now create a mediated human-brand image” (1836).
As such, Instagram poets can amass followers on their sites by brand-
ing themselves in certain ways, using not only poetry but also selfies.
In an illustration of this human branding, Rupi Kaur’s Instagram
page offers a mixture of stylized selfies, poems, and simple illustra-
tions. It is pleasingly aesthetic and plays to the specific ethos that
Kaur curates and presents to her followers.
Kaur is a Canadian poet with a Sikh Indian background, who shot
to fame in 2015 after Instagram removed a photograph that was part
298 Lili P^
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of her series on menstruation. In the image, Kaur lay on a bed facing

away from the camera with a period stain visible on her pants and
the bedsheets. As Kaur explains on her website, the photography ser-
ies was part of a project for a university course on visual rhetoric
(“period”). Citing popular porn Instagram accounts as counterexam-
ples, Kaur used the censorship as a platform to question social
responses to the natural female body (Driscoll). This incident gar-
nered support for Kaur and brought more attention to her photogra-
phy and poetry, and she currently has over three million followers on
Instagram. The attempted censorship of her work positioned Kaur as
a cultural producer who appeals to women (particularly women of
color) who are suppressed, shamed, and silenced.
Kaur is exactly the kind of person who can build a human brand
through Instagram, because, as Eagar and Dann argue, “the inter-
net allows noncelebrities to build and display an image of themselves
to a mass audience without the power ascribed by fame. The shift
from the power of celebrity to the ‘everyperson’ creates opportunities
for individuals to self-express a constructed public image” (1837).
From the outset, Kaur’s public image was unapologetically feminist
and loud. By showing the truth of menstruation, she branded herself
as authentic on a SNS known for its filters. Its origins in a course on
visual rhetoric also suggest that she knows how to craft persuasive
visual arguments. She curates an Instagram page that presents simple
poems spliced with striking selfies, professional photographs, and
illustrations. The photographs brand Kaur as successful, spiritual,
and emphasize her as an individual. In their application of genres to
selfies, Eagar and Dann’s definition of the “self-help selfie” most
resembles Kaur’s photographs. They write:

Self-help selfies claim a position of mastery over a field-specific

social capital, and through demonstrations of this mastery they are
able to build an audience. The self-help genre is characterized by
thematic structures of mastery through using formal features of
flattering images demonstrating self-achievement, often situated
within the physical appearance fields of beauty, fashion and exer-
cise, accompanied by a rhetoric function of charting a journey of
self-invention.… These are postcards from personal journeys, illus-
trating way-point markers of life stages and screenshots of a self-
invention journey.
(1848)
Selfie-Help 299

It is interesting to compare this definition of self-help selfies to the

photographs on Kaur’s Instagram page, which demonstrate her “mas-
tery” over internal peace through poetry by using “flattering
images . . . charting a journey of self-invention.” While the highly
artificial photographs can hardly be considered selfies anymore, they
show her in spiritual positions, reminding her followers of her Sikh
background (which she has claimed influences her poetry). In a vari-
ety of photographs, she has her eyes closed peacefully as if meditat-
ing, she thoughtfully looks away from the camera, or gratefully
smiles. The message to her followers is that Kaur has reached an
inner peace that she can pass on to them, if only they buy her books
of poetry. This message is communicated not only through the use of
self-help selfies but through a combination of different media on the
page—poetry, selfie, and illustration.
Other Instagram poets also have specific curated brands they sell to
their follower. For example, Atticus wears a Guy Fawkes mask to
remain anonymous (although his poetry is doggedly apolitical) and
posts monochrome selfies of himself riding his motorcycle. Often, the
poems are also presented in posed photographs, where the poem will
be typewritten and sometimes still sitting in the typewriter—a com-
mon style used by Christopher Poindexter, JM Storm, Alfa Poet, J.
Iron Word, MvDarkLight, The Poetry Bandit, and others (see Lupin;
also known as The Poetry Bandit). Poets will also occasionally feature
collaborations with illustrators and photographers. These uses of
image highlight how nostalgia and vintage aesthetics contribute to a
branding culture for Instagram poets. The idea seems to be that poets
are old-fashioned and romantic and that this romanticism is an
appealing deviation to the focus on superficial physical attributes that
is common to the rest of Instagram. This apparent departure from the
shallow norms of Instagram is replicated in the poems themselves,
which often emphasize healing or inner beauty. The use of old-fash-
ioned technology, such as typewriters, contrasts the idea of the poets
working solely online, adding depth to their brand. Ironically, how-
ever, the photographs of poetry are stylized and must be beautiful in
order to earn likes and followers, and, in fact, the poet must curate a
stylish and aesthetic page that skillfully combines image, text, and
brand. In a sense, the vintage aesthetic could be considered ironic.
The poems are accompanied by hashtags to make them searchable
for Instagram users. As Eagar and Dann write, “Without the
300 Lili P^
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simplicity of labelling and contextualization, Instagram’s capacity to

communicate accurate self-ascribed meaning would be considerably
limited” (1840). The idea of metacommentary on images, particularly
images that may also include text such as poems, links Instagram
poetry to ancient rhetorical theories of ekphrasis. In its classical defi-
nition, ekphrasis describes an absent image and therefore “tries to
make the listeners into spectators” (Serafim 98). While poetry makes
use of ekphrasis in order to verbally describe visual settings, scenes,
and items, Instagram poets often also use hashtags in a kind of mod-
ern ekphrasis, making their visuals (whether selfies, illustrations, or
typewritten poems) available by describing them in search terms.
These terms also allow the poets’ followers to understand the mean-
ing behind the poems and begin conversations, as well as to catego-
rize them by meaning, idea, or type. When Valentine Cunningham
describes ekphrasis as “one of literature’s oldest and longest-lasting
effects and practices” (57), she makes way for modern technologies
and sites such as Instagram to participate in deploying this ancient
effect. The use of ekphrasis through hashtags is one of the ways Insta-
gram poets create a human brand through curating pages of text,
image, and emotion. Ekphrastic effects also take place within the
poems, often through metaphor.
The use of ekphrastic effects in hashtags and poems is supported
by the images in the selfies to create an overall effect; that is, the
human brand of the Instagram poet. As Eager and Dunn conclude,
“Sharing the selfie on social media creates the imperative for the audi-
ence to be able to ‘read’ the different narratives. In this reading, the
human brand that is communicated is interpreted by the
audience. . . . [This] highlights the importance of tempo, rhythm and
periods in storytelling: the selfie is a single beat within an ongoing
virtual narration” (1838). Interestingly, Rupi Kaur and other poets
also use photographs from readings, which give their poems, selfies,
and metacommentary an ongoing narrative. This narrative is one of
healing and positive thinking. By showing through photographs and
ekphrastic metacommentary that their poetry has healed them, Insta-
gram poets are selling their brand to followers. Many of them also
have print books of poems that they advertise on their pages.
Perhaps academics feel wary about this kind of self-branding,
instilled through knowledge and findings about depression in social
media, and the way many SNSs profit from their users’ free labor. As
Selfie-Help 301

Brooke Duffy and Jefferson Pooley argue, these criticisms have been
aimed at the academic version of a SNS, Academia.edu, and “The
logic of self-branding—of carefully curated self-promotion—is a fact
of social media life, for everyday users and cultural workers alike” (8).
For the Instagram poets, among many other contemporary online per-
sonalities, self-branding allows them to appear authentic by giving
readers more immediate access to the authors, but at the same time it
can appear commercially necessary for authors bypassing traditional
gatekeepers such as literary critics and publishing houses. As Alice
Marwick puts it, “Self-branding, while widely taken up in the tech
scene, is inherently contradictory. It promotes both ‘authenticity’ and
business-targeted self-presentation” (167). However, as she continues,
self-branding via the Internet allows individuals “to apply sophisti-
cated branding strategies used by modern multinational companies to
themselves, and social media in particular has allowed individuals
with internet access to broadcast to the world in an affordable way”
(183). Therefore, poets can use SNSs, such as Instagram, to self-pro-
mote in ways they could not have in the past. The traditional gate-
keepers of what is publishable and/or critically relevant have been
circumvented through the Internet, and now publishers must look to
online audiences to find what is popular and publishable.

Audience and Affect

To be sure, Instagram poetry is indeed full of cliches, bad metaphors,

and aesthetic similarities that give way to parody. Like most other
literary genres, it shares common tropes, and it is full of authors of
variable talent. The continual use of images of typewritten poems,
lack of capitalization or punctuation, and sentences broken over a few
lines are some of the familiar cliches of Instagram poetry. For exam-
ple, following the popularity of Rupi Kaur’s first collection Milk and
Honey (2015), many of the poets have replicated the same tired meta-
phor of sugar or honey, which has been arguably a common theme in
poetry for thousands of years. On the other hand, some poets demon-
strate a self-awareness of their reliance on cliches and aestheticism. K.
Towne Jr. writes the self-aware poem, “Sex/Drugs/and/shamelessly
self promoting my poetry so that I, too, can one day sit in the front
row of fashion week and have people talk about my hair” (Towne).
302 Lili P^
aquet

As Sadaf Ahsan writes about Kaur’s poetry, the metaphors, motifs,

line breaks, and use of lower case are “quirks reminiscent of the social
network they inhabit . . .. While that simplicity can belie its own
complexity, it’s also easy to imitate, which is why it’s become
synonymous with social media poets.” While these conventional
tropes might seem to cast aspersions on the authenticity of the poems
and paradoxically inhibit their messages about superficiality, the
poems are often liked by thousands of Instagram users. To argue that
as academics such a popular form of poetry is too lowbrow to be con-
sidered serious sets up damaging binaries that ignore the importance
of the poems as popular cultural products. The poets create valuable
cultural products and are therefore important cultural artists.
Another way to view these recurring quirks of Instagram poetry is
to consider them as genre conventions that unify the corpus. As
Ahsan writes, the conventions are linked with social media poetry,
and the ease in comprehending them could account for the oft-used
metaphors and simplicity. Agatha French also seems to find the ease
and speed of consuming Kaur’s poetry is part of the appeal, writing
that it “is immediately digestible. Like an image of a friend’s face or
a beautiful sunset, it arrives as a comforting affirmation while alone
in bed, scrolling your phone.” French’s use of the term “affirmation”
is interesting, implying that the poems are more like positive affirma-
tions given in self-help guides. And indeed, some of them read as
such.
The poems are presented to be consumed quickly and simply on a
smartphone, and their quotability has allowed for a subset of fans
who tattoo poems on their bodies. For example, on November 25,
2017, Atticus shared a photograph of a woman who had tattooed his
poem, which describes a woman’s conquest of her scars, on her thigh,
implying that she had recovered from depression and self-harm. He
added the comment, “I’ve met so many strong people in my life that
have come out of dark places with such power. It’s so inspiring to see
and feel their strength. Thank you for finding meaning here and
thank you for sharing it with me. What a beautiful tattoo” (Atticus).
Comments left under his post include those by followers who have
also tattooed the same poem over their scars or are planning to (Atti-
cus; see also Word). Atticus also includes a “story” (a montage of
photographs) at the top of his Instagram page that showcases tattoos
of his poetry. As Margo DeMello has suggested about contemporary
Selfie-Help 303

tattoo culture, tattoos of these body-affirmative poems are a logical

step: “Appealing to the post-sixties generation, the modern tattoo
culture provides both the symbols, as well as the ideologies, of spiri-
tual, aesthetic, and emotional fulfilment” (47). By also choosing as
one’s text a poem that affirms spiritual and emotional fulfillment,
these tattoos symbolize and also inscribe their message in words.
Photos of these tattoos are then shared with the poets and added to
their curated pages. In these ways, the poetry is uniquely and cleverly
adapted to suit the audience and medium of Instagram, where readers
will peruse the poems on their smartphones and sometimes find in
the brevity and message an affirmation to inscribe on their bodies. As
Louise Woodstock argues about the exchanges between tattoo artists
and clients in the reality television shows Miami Ink and LA Ink, “At
the heart of this exchange sits the tattoo itself, saturated with sym-
bolism. Time and time again, both artists and clients endow tattoos
with transformative power and consider them expressive marks of
both the inner self and the social bonds that unite the self with loved
ones” (“Tattoo” 781). Research shows that these readers are also likely
to suffer from depression or body image issues, and thus the positive
body images raised through the ekphrasis in these poems could be
somewhat curative. Woodstock explains that even modern ideas of
tattooing employ “self-help rhetoric” and suggests, “When we tell
the stories of our lives we draw upon the social narratives we have
learned while participating in culture. And arguably we live in a cul-
ture infused with social narratives that transform pain and suffering
into positive therapeutic benefits. Tattoo narratives are formulaic,
suggesting a readily available, cultural template in active use”
(“Tattoo” 793).
Tattooing these body-positive poems onto their own bodies
allows the followers of Instagram poets to take possession of the
ekphrasis relayed to them. As Andreas Serafim argues, through
ekphrasis, “manipulated versions of the past are created in the pre-
sent in a way that enables the speaker to give the audience a sense
of involvement in (real or fabricated) events distant in time, while
simultaneously eliciting their verbal or nonverbal reaction and
manipulating their emotional responses, whether of admiration, con-
tempt or hostility” (108). Instagram poets elicit involvement from
their followers, whether they like or comment on their poems, or at
the most extreme, tattoo the poems on their bodies. Occasionally
304 Lili P^
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the responses are negative, or “hostile” to use Serafim’s term, but

more often they are admiring. And through tattooing, the abstract
representation of ekphrasis is given a concrete image again,
inscribed onto the body of the fan.
The audience response is consistently emphasized in theories of
ekphrasis. Michael Squire writes, “each handbook conceptualises
ekphrasis in terms of its rhetorical results: the subjects of ekphrasis
are of secondary importance to the trope’s phenomenological effect”
(162). To put it simply, the idea/image/scene being described in the
ekphrastic epigram is not as important as the effect of the ekphrasis
on the audience. It is clear that some followers have taken body-posi-
tive ekphrasis and made it their own by inscribing it on their bodies
as a tattoo. These messages are therefore made more permanent, or
“real,” because “unlike hairstyles or clothing, tattoos are not worn
upon the body but rather inscribed into the body” (Kosut 1040,
emphasis original). The poems chosen often give the metaphorical
message that authenticity is more important than perfection.
This message is a contradictory one for an SNS like Instagram,
which is particularly identified as narcissistic through its focus on
physical perfection, advertising, and selfies. As Susan Sontag writes,
“there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture . . . it
turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed” (14–
15). The effect on viewers of these images may also be negative if
they identify the pictured person as more physically attractive, pop-
ular, or happy than themselves. In fact, studies have shown links
between Instagram users and high levels of depression. Katerina
Lup and her colleagues found that depression is particular to users
who browse the accounts of strangers or celebrities on Instagram.
As they write:

Browsing the enhanced photos of celebrities or other strangers on

Instagram may trigger assumptions that these photos are indica-
tive of how the people in them actually live. Such conclusions
make people more vulnerable to judging themselves in relation to
the assumed (but often unrealistic) lives of others, which can trig-
ger feelings of distress. Thus, the nonreciprocal and public nature
of sharing enhanced photos on Instagram may represent a combi-
nation of features likely to trigger negative feelings about the self,
particularly for users that follow large numbers of strangers.
(Lup et al. 248)
Selfie-Help 305

Thus, countering the depression felt by users of Instagram with a

curated rhetoric of self-help selfies, body-positive ekphrastic meta-
phors and imagery, and an authentic vintage aesthetic allows poets to
target a specific audience of a specific platform.
Furthermore, the audience targeted seems to be almost exclusively
young women. The poems are often about women, whether a third-
person “her” or about women’s experiences from a personal stand-
point. Rupi Kaur, for example, writes poems about rape, about her
mother, and about global women’s issues. In his study of ancient
poetry in the ekphrastic tradition, Simon Goldhill finds that, despite
earlier scholarship to the contrary, there is no difference in the writ-
ing of male and female poets. He argues, “since there is no explicit
recognition of a specifically female viewing subject or a female
ekphrastic tradition . . . claims for a specifically marked female view-
ing subject seem to have no solid foundation” (14). However, the
same cannot be argued about contemporary Instagram poetry and its
approach to its largely female audience. Responding to criticisms on
the quality of Rupi Kaur’s poetry, Jeremey Noel-Tod writes that,
“Kaur’s style is artless and therefore sincere; its lack of workbench
polish is the mark of immediacy. This is poetry that aspires to be
message rather than music—and it is a potently direct and feminist
message.”
It is also worth mentioning that Kaur is a woman of color and
appeals to a global audience of women whose voices may often be
silenced and marginalized. As Ahsan argues, “Kaur has managed to
strike a chord with countless young brown women who don’t or can’t
share their voices outside the internet. In her work, they’ve found
themselves, and if that isn’t the job of poetry—online or offline—I’m
not sure what is.” P a v a n a has a similar approach to Kaur in writing
about immigration. In one poem she writes, culture has become / a
bouquet of foreign flowers / decorating a dinner table. / no story of
our roots, / only of how we were obtained (Mazadohta). P a v a n a’s
poem (also available in her book Rangoli, published under the pen-
name Pavana Reddy) has all the hallmarks of Instagram poetry—it is
short, uses lower case and line breaks, and a nature metaphor. How-
ever, it is also powerful in its simplicity, and speaks to an immigrant
woman’s perspective of cultural appropriation and the male gaze,
quite a lot for two sentences to achieve.
306 Lili P^
aquet

Self-Help and Community

The sentimental messages of Instagram poetry work synchronously

with the self-help selfies on the poets’ pages. The poetry, thus, draws
the focus away from the superficiality of the SNS and toward self-
positivity and healing. In this way, Instagram poetry partly relies on
techniques of self-help literature and sometimes specifically mentions
the medium it works within. For example, one of Alicia Cook’s
poems reads:

I am not sure when wearing a facßade became

the new black. I am not interested in my
manufactured fifteen minutes. A lot goes on in
the peripheral of this curated life. I would
rather write consistently, than cosmically. My
authenticity should not be considered a unique
character trait. In fact, I should not be called
“sincere” just because I choose to write openly
and honestly about what truly matters to me
versus what I want others to believe matters to
me. I’ve learned recently the two aren’t always
mutually exclusive, and that’s sad. To hell with
images; preconceived notions should not
hold the power to birth doppelgangers of
actual people. That’s the thing, when my
mirror-image shatters, I will remain. Will you?
(Cook, emphasis original)
She uses hashtags including #empowerment and #selflove, and the
poem references images and authenticity, linking back to ideas of
photo filters and superficiality on Instagram. On October 18, 2017,
Nikita Gill shared a poem that recommends healing at one’s own
pace, without comparing oneself to the apparent success of other peo-
ple (Gill). While Gill’s poem might read as hackneyed self-affirma-
tion, it has been liked over thirteen thousand times, and therefore has
connected emotionally with her audience. Another poem on healing
with roughly the same number of likes is Beau Taplin’s poem that
reads:

There is no right or wrong way to grieve,

Gorge yourself on fatty foods, bawl until your
eyes are red, or take some quiet time away.
Selfie-Help 307

Whatever it takes to help you cope with the

loss, heal the wound, and lead you back to a
lighter and less volatile space.
(Taplin)
Woodstock writes that modern self-help literature was circulated
through mass paperback production, and “Self-help’s success came
about through the savvy use of mass communication” (“Vying” 164).
An infinitely more sharable platform, Instagram allows users to parse
certain self-help ideas more quickly and effectively. Woodstock also
argues that self-help literature draws on shifting cultural discourses
of science and religion but, most importantly, positive thinking. She
writes:

When boiled to its essence, positive thinking holds that thoughts

shape reality. This notion endows the mental processes of the iso-
lated individual with the curative capital most frequently theo-
rized in communication studies as stemming from social
interaction. Simply put, this belief in the power of thought holds
that individuals can change their lives, their relationships, their
jobs, and their personalities by thinking differently, through the
power of thought alone.
(“Vying” 156)

It is especially interesting to evaluate Rupi Kaur’s Instagram page

through its appropriation of some aspects of self-help literature. Kaur
emphasizes the importance of her Sikh upbringing to her style of
poetry. In an interview with Rebecca Szkutak, she says, “Sikh tradition
is based off of poetry. All the holy texts and scriptures, it’s all written
in poetic verse.” This background gives her poetry an idea of spiritual-
ity more than any overt religious message. Her peaceful photographs
backstop the messages of positive thinking. Her published collections
have both sold millions of copies as well, demonstrating how she has
successfully adapted her Instagram brand to more traditional mediums.
Kaur’s second published collection of poems, The Sun and Her
Flowers (2017), is split into five chapters that demonstrate a process
of grieving and healing, titled: “Wilting,” “Falling,” “Rooting,”
“Rising,” and “Blooming.” The nature motif is prevalent throughout.
For example, one untitled poem describes the concept of “home”
through the natural metaphor of a tree’s roots (215). The poem is
accompanied by an illustration of a woman sitting in a meditative
308 Lili P^
aquet

position with vines growing over her and birds and butterflies perch-
ing on her head and arms. The positive thinking message is prevalent
in this poem, as Kaur champions the idea that change does not come
from other people but from within one’s own thinking. The idea of
change emerging from the mind is also promoted in another untitled
poem in the book that reimagines the perceived aesthetic failures in
the narrator’s body as a biological miracle (78). Here again, Kaur
communicates the idea that it is not the body but the way one thinks
about one’s body that causes problems. To change this way of think-
ing is an internal, individual process. It seems a contradictory mes-
sage for a poet who works on a site that is supposedly more about
community and sharing, that supports individual efforts over com-
munity-based practice or therapy. It is also interesting to note, that
supporting a reading of Kaur as a self-help figure who claims individ-
ual thought can heal, she does not follow anyone on Instagram.
The ekphrasis in the former poem is a metaphor of roots connect-
ing mind and body, with its connotations of family and inner depth
through “the foundations of home” within the narrator, and yet even
with the drawn illustration, ekphrasis has been criticized as overly
representative rather than practical. As Justine Seran argues, “The
photographic image is an object, and its description in words can
only ever be the representation of a representation” (436–37), or to
put it even more succinctly, “ekphrasis is the verbal representation of
visual representation” (Heffernan 3). This criticism of ekphrasis is
similar to criticism of self-help literature as overly symbolic by
emphasizing the ability of positive thinking to induce real, practical
change in one’s circumstances. Despite these criticisms, ekphrasis
allows the verbal to be thought of as authentic, for, as Seran writes,
“The images described in the narratives are textual artefacts, and it is
argued that the author’s ekphrastic relationship with them aims at
uncovering ‘real’ identity through self-representation and the rejec-
tion of outside representations” (436). That is, the very act of individ-
ual expression involved in ekphrasis—say, in a poem—allows readers
to interpret it as more authentic. In some ways, this carries through
to the use of Instagram and the messages that poets communicate
through the site. They eschew the superficiality of Instagram, para-
doxically on Instagram, using ekphrasis that may persuade their fol-
lowers of their authenticity compared to other public figures on
Instagram. Furthermore, they curate a mixture of texts in order to
Selfie-Help 309

communicate their message through poetry, photography, illustra-

tion, and collaborative works. The poets’ very separation from acade-
mia and lofty language may also allow for an interpretation of their
texts as more immediate, genuine, and authentic. When evaluating
studies that focus on audience perception of news photography by
professionals compared to those by amateurs on Instagram, Eddy
Borges-Rey finds that audiences prefer the amateurs because they per-
ceive them as more trustworthy, emotionally authentic, immediate,
and “raw” (573). He finds that this trust is due to the presence of
amateurs at the events they document, which is clearly dissimilar to
the highly stylized photographs by Instagram poets, and yet they also
have perceived authenticity and realism through their amateur status.
Their poems are not necessarily entirely individualized either. As
Woodstock writes, the self-help genre is “inherently social” because
the author is communicating an approach to the reader (“All” 321).
Furthermore, Woodstock argues, “Unlike other genres, in which
authors articulate professional expertise and generate difference from
the readers to create the authority to tell the tale, self-help authors do
the opposite . . . through articulation of similarity with the reader”
(322–33). Similarly, Instagram poets’ noncelebrity status and identifi-
cation with their followers allow their advice to be accepted. In one
simple poem titled “medicine” in Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers, she
writes that women need to be kinder to themselves and each other,
rather than looking for support from men (228). She advocates both
self-love and the support of a female community in order to heal
body image problems. Her message of female community, aimed at
specifically female audiences, is particularly prevalent in the poems of
the final chapter “Blooming.” In poems such as “we are not each
other’s competition” (226; see also 232), Kaur specifically addresses
her readers as “sister.” She advocates being “mouthy” in order “to be
heard” (238) and uses metaphors of gladiator pits, but she also writes
that women should not compete against each other (236). In her
communication to a female audience, she uses ekphrastic imagery in a
way that Simon Goldhill found classical female poets did not.
The poems are often shared amongst friends and by charities to draw
attention to their causes. As Tariro Mzezewa writes, fans share Kaur’s
poems with each other during hard times, and also, “Organizations
including the National Eating Disorders Association, Moms Can Code,
and Curvy Girls Scoliosis all broadcast Ms. Kaur’s work on social media
310 Lili P^
aquet

as encouragement, solidarity or motivation.” In an even more practical

use of the poetry, Christopher Poindexter posted a photograph that used
his poetry in hurricane relief efforts by Jeremy Cowart, who used the
entire proceeds of print sales of his “Resilient Light” photography to
help the American communities affected by Hurricane Irma (Poindex-
ter). In this way, the poetry is part of an online medium that allows
instantaneous community feedback, collaboration, sharing, inclusivity,
and aid. Even though the poets may write about the benefits of individ-
ual positive thinking, the SNS they work on allows their poems to take
on new communal life. In an interview with Caroline Sanderson, Nikita
Gill says that a lot of Instagram poets write in order “to help” and fur-
ther, “When you publish poetry on such open platforms, people can
approach you more easily.” Indeed, despite its connections to depres-
sion, body image issues, and superficiality, Instagram is inherently a
communal online space in which one can connect with other people.
Using hashtags to allow users to search for posts also allows them to
connect with a like-minded online community. As Borges-Rey
suggests, on Instagram a photographer posts their work, and then

simulations organise informational data to describe a scene visu-

ally, whilst simultaneously generating a reaction from the commu-
nity, reflected by either their active involvement in commenting,
liking and following images and photographers, or by consolidat-
ing the aesthetic hegemony of these performative discourses by
creating further simulacra consistent with its conventions.
(587)

While the poems could indeed be discussed simply in terms of their

cliches and conventions, the poets have tapped into an audience
through their chosen medium in a clever branding strategy that bor-
rows certain self-help techniques. The term “followers” to describe
Rupi Kaur’s fans seems fitting, as she sometimes reads as more of a
self-help guru than a poet.

Conclusion

Academic scholarship has largely ignored Instagram poets, perhaps

considering the subgenre too mass-market and uncultured for
Selfie-Help 311

extended evaluation. The elitism of this kind of response excludes

intriguing ideas about the poetry that is being sold to millions of
readers in a time when poetry is supposedly perishing. However, the
study of Instagram poetry must take into account the entirety of the
poet’s page, including their ekphrastic poems, photographs, hashtags,
imagery, and borrowings of conventions from self-help literature. The
photography uses self-help selfies, the hashtags make the poems
searchable by terms such as #healing and #selflove, and the tattoos
based on the body-positive poems are also discussed more widely
using self-help rhetoric. Instagram poets combine these elements to
curate an aesthetic kind of human branding that counters the depres-
sion and body image negativity felt by many users of the social net-
working site. Indeed, ignoring the page as a whole and only
considering the poetry replicates criticisms of researchers in ekphras-
tics, who “construct text–image relations variably, not without impli-
cations for the power relations between media . . . . Traditionally,
critics envisage ekphrasis as writing on art, a top-down suggestion
that implies that the battle for mastery is already won (by the wri-
ter)” (Harrow 259). While many of these poets are following in Rupi
Kaur’s footsteps and publishing book collections, it is their curating
of an online human brand that has allowed them to gain the momen-
tum to bypass the traditional publishing industry and communicate
directly to their readers.
Looking forward, this burgeoning subgenre of Instagram poetry
requires additional in-depth evaluation and dialogue, especially about
its links to self-help literature. Often one hears that poetry is a dying
art, that no one reads poetry anymore; however, the popularity of Kaur
and her contemporaries challenges this claim. While she may not have
studied poetry at university, Kaur did study rhetoric. The way that she
and other Instagram poets employ the rhetorical techniques of ekphras-
tic writing reveals the deep degree to which they understand the emo-
tional impact of their brand of Instagram poetry on their followers.

Thanks go to K. Towne Jr., Alicia Cook, Beau Taplin, and Pavana Reddy for permission to use
their poems in this article, and to Jeremy Cowart, Jon Lupin, jazz d44 and mann012 for per-
mission to use their images, even though they did not end up in the published article. Thank
you also to the reviewers and editors for their helpful suggestions.
312 Lili P^
aquet

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Lili P^aquet is a lecturer in writing at the University of New England,

Australia, with an interest in rhetoric and digital literature. Her book on
crime fiction by former criminal justice professionals was recently published
by McFarland.

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