Social Media Poets

Poetry is one of the most flexible art forms. You don’t need anything else beyond an idea and a few words to get a point across that usually can’t be expressed any other way. It can be quick or long or profound or pointed in order to become whatever it needs to be, which is why it’s so oddly fitting that poetry has infiltrated social media. Facebook and Instagram have their fair shares of independent poets and writers that are easy to miss if you don’t know where to look.

I found my current favorite poet on Instagram months ago. Her pseudonym is f.d.soul and she operates in a blessed ring of supportive feminist Instagram poets much like herself. F.d.soul just published her first collection of poetry, bound under the name “indigo.” It’s the first poetry book that I’ve ever bought for myself, and definitely will not be the last. Her style is indicative of the greater trend of social media poets - deeply personal, yet short and to the point. The bite-sized poems are the kind of thing you wind up seeing on Pinterest in the form of a tattoo on someone's back, which speaks to the immense relation that f.d.soul and her colleagues are able to produce with such limited space. The platform itself forces a kind of succinct profundity - any social media poet that can't quite grasp the punch-in-the-gut line is left in the oblivion of social media irrelevance, ensuring that successful social media poets are, for the most part, schooled in this precise confessional style.
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It's a new world where our poetry comes in the form of Instagram posts, but honestly, I'm here for it.

Written by Kristen H. ('20)