Instapoetry and PoetryTok: Rethinking Poetry for the Digital Age

Poetry used to live in books and journals. Now, it's fighting for space between influencer posts, hashtags, and TikTok trends. Instead of resisting this shift, award-winning poet and AU Literature Professor Kyle Dargan is asking: What if poets leaned in?

This semester, Dargan's Advanced Poetry Workshop is taking a new approach to writing-rather than shunning social media, students are exploring how to write poetry for these digital spaces.

"Students are often seeking my guidance on how to penetrate publishing and find their audiences, and the reality is that the answers from 25 years ago simply do not suffice in the contemporary content environment," Dargan says. "And part of being honest about how to grow in the field now is acknowledging that, as much as general "instapoetry" is maligned, social media platforms are where the readers are, and we need to find artistic and sincere ways to enter the vertical theatre of the smartphone, where we indiscriminately consume the majority of our content today."

Dargan says he had a eureka moment after reading a recent N+1 article that explored how Netflix shapes our relationship to content as consumers and creators. Netflix screenwriters now craft dialogue where characters explain their actions, assuming viewers are likely distracted by their phones while "watching" television. "It all got me to thinking that if screenwriters are being asked to adapt in these ways, what does it mean for poets?"

Dargan asked his workshop if they wanted to focus on multimedia or more traditional poems-and they chose to take the ride with him on this new approach to poetry. Here are some samples of their work:

Jalisa Orellana Hardy

"Poetry workshop this semester has been super helpful in considering the relationship between poetry and social media. We've been working on shorter forms, still & moving images, and sound as a way to experiment with writing & modern tech. If we want people to read our poems, we got to go where the people are. Which is on their phones."