How do I love thee?

Let me Instagram it
Mobbed at signings, followed by millions and topping the bestseller lists: Instapoets
such as Lang Leav, Rupi Kaur and Tyler Knott Gregson are poetry’s new superstars,
publishing their love poems and haiku on social media. But are they any good?

In 2013, Lang Leav self-published a small debut poetry collection, Love & Misadventure, online. Two years later, she
was meeting her fans on a book tour in the Philippines. “It was insane,” she says. “The organisers had to limit each
signing to 500 people per session … and I was being escorted by armed guards.” Many queued for hours, some
camping out overnight for a chance to meet her.

Leav is one of a new generation of bestselling poets catapulted to celebrity – and coveted book deals – through the use
of social media, and the huge followings they have built up. Dubbed the “Instapoets”, they have thousands upon
thousands of followers hooked on their every post across Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter – and they defy
the age-old preconception that it is not possible to make a living out of being a poet.

Leav had around 50,000 followers on Tumblr when she published her first collection. Her poems on love and
heartbreak sold close to 10,000 copies in one month and she soon had a powerful literary agent and a deal with a US
publisher. Her third collection, Memories, was published last month, and her books have now sold more than 300,000
copies in the space of three years. Love & Misadventure remains the top-selling book of love poems on Amazon and
Lullabies is ranked fourth. “I always knew I would do something with books,” she says, “but having three international
bestsellers has gone beyond my wildest dreams.”

According to the New York Times, three of the top 10 bestselling poetry books in the US at present have been written
by poets at the forefront of the Instapoet movement. Leav, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand, grew up in
Australia and now lives in New Zealand, is one of them; the other two most popular Instapoets of the moment are Rupi
Kaur and Tyler Knott Gregson. All of them wear their hearts on their sleeves and write lyrically on themes of love, loss
and loneliness.

Rather than fill their Instagram feeds purely with selfies, they take photos of snippets of their poetry, sometimes
handwritten or typed in black and white, and they receive thousands of likes for each one from fans all over the world.
Thousands more unpublished would-be poets are attempting to do the same and posting their efforts, good and bad,
under various hashtags like #instapoetry or #instagrampoetry.

Kaur, an artist and poet who lives in Toronto, says on her website that she writes about the “experience of violence,
abuse, love, loss, and femininity”. She already made headlines through her Instagram account earlier this year, when
she posted a picture of herself in bed with a small amount of menstrual blood staining her pyjamas and sheets, a
photograph which Instagram temporarily banned.

Now though, her feed is mostly about her writing. Her latest Instagram poem reads: “i am sorry this world / could not
keep you safe / may your journey home / be a soft and peaceful one.” It is accompanied by her hand-drawn illustration
of a globe, countries hit by terror attacks marked with little black hearts. At the time of writing, it had received 33,300
likes.

Kaur’s poetry collection, Milk & Honey, was an Amazon bestseller when it was first released last year. Like Lang, she
began by self-publishing her work; the pair now share the same publisher, Andrews McMeel. On her website, she
writes (all in lower case, as is her style): “there was no market for poetry about trauma abuse loss love and healing
through the lens of a punjabi-sikh immigrant woman. so i decided to self publish. even though everyone said not to
cause doing so would lock me out of prestigious literary circles.”

Knott Gregson used to be a copywriter. For the last six years, he has been writing haiku on love every single day and
posting photographs of them on his social media accounts online, either scribbled on Post-it notes or typed on to
crumpled pieces of paper (he is also a photographer). “The resilience / the tireless endurance / for love we deserve,” he
writes in one post (3,811 likes at the time of writing). “Gentle in the night / your hands, swimming through the sheets /
wash up on my skin,” (3059 likes). Gregson’s first book, Chasers of the Light, made the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers
list in the Wall Street Journal. He now has a second, and features in women’s magazines: the kind of mainstream
success that isn’t usually associated with poets.

Leav says she only began “getting serious” with Instagram at the start of this year. Her combined overall social media
following, including Facebook and Twitter, is now close to a million. She spends around three hours a day interacting
with her readers and followers on social media, but says she doesn’t feel any pressure to keep up with her online
presence. “It doesn’t feel like work to me because I love interacting with my readers. It has become a natural part of my
day, and something I look forward to.”

One of her most recent Instagram posts included an extract from her latest book: “The days catapult before me,” it
begins. “The world is spinning too quickly. It gets harder and harder to retrace my steps. To figure out how I got to be
here.” “The words you put together, it is simply amazing!” writes one follower. “So perfect,” says another. Among her
most liked posts is a poem called He and I: “When words run dry / he does not try / nor do I / We are on par / He just
is / I just am / and we just are”.

Despite their popular success, the Instapoets’ style of angsty heartbreak poetry and daily outpourings of emotion is not
to everyone’s taste. Nor do they undergo the same rigorous revising processes of more conventional poets. Gregson has
said he never edits his 17-syllable haiku – “because it felt like betraying the exact emotion of the time” – and Leav says
anything she posts online should be considered a first draft.

So, does Instapoetry live up to literary critique? “It’s important to remember that poetry is not just about the
uncontrolled expression of how you feel, but how you shape that expression,” says Rishi Dastidar, assistant editor at
the poetry magazine, the Rialto. “What makes you a poet is learning the craft, spending time reading other poets and
bringing writerly tools to the emotions you are trying to convey. I think it’s great if people are enjoying poetry through
social media but the next step would be to read more poetry and understand what else is out there. Contemporary
poets offline are incredibly vibrant – it’s just directing people into that world.”

Still, the Instapoets are doing what surely every poet wants to achieve: connecting with and moving their readers –
and achieving commercial success with it.

“It’s actually a great subversion of the debates on narcissism and self-obsession which always accompany social
media,” says Dastidar. “Posting a poem instead of a selfie means you are asking people to engage with you at a deeper
level, and that sort of subversion is part of poetry’s tradition.”