With the rise of social media, there has also come the rise of poetry on media platforms like Instagram. This has made poetry very accessible to everyone and the poets themselves, as well as their poetry, have grown massively in popularity and are becoming international bestsellers.
Rupi Kaur has changed the way in which young people think and feel about poetry. Today we don’t have to take out a book on poetry and feel like we’re going back to our leaving cert days. We can now easily go on to our Instagram and get up a string of poets and their work all with the click of a button.
Rupi Kaur brought her writing to Instagram in 2014 and since that she has grown massively in terms of recognition for her poetry and how much it relates to so many people. She brought out a collection of poetry called Milk and Honey back in 2014 and she has since risen to international popularity. Her book is about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss and femininity.
She has also brought out another book called The Sun and Her Flowers that was published in 2017. Kaur has a following of three million on Instagram and as well as putting up her own pictures of herself, she shares short excerpts from her collections of poetry that get over a hundred thousand likes each time.
With the rise of Rupi Kaur, it has since given other poets the chance to branch out and post their work on Instagram. We now have poets like Nikita Gill, Atticus, Tyler Knott Gregson and many more that have grown on Instagram as poets and have since published their own books.
These poets all talk about different emotions that hit hard with their readers and the way they present their poetry on Instagram – either with a plain background or a drawing – is just enough to catch the eye without being overwhelmed by a lot of words and pictures.
It is so accessible to get such good quality poetry on Instagram and this, in turn, gets many young people back into poetry and they form a liking towards it. When some people think on poetry it brings them back to their leaving cert days when they had to learn off a spiel of facts about the poet and also learn quotes from the poems and it wasn’t all that fun.
But now, there are many people following these poets and liking their posts as they can relate to their words and they have an interest in it. The poetry is easy to get to and it is nice to read when all you want to do is sit down with a cup of tea and indulge in it.
Maybe this is the way that all poets will soon follow to reach out to a bigger audience and grow from there as it seems it is the right way to go.