Happy National Poetry Month! April is filled with different ways to read, write, watch, and listen to all kinds of poetry. One of my personal favorites is Escapril.
What is Escapril?
Escaping into poetry every day of April! The premise is simple: follow the prompts to write a poem every day of the month. Since its inception in 2019, almost 90,000 writers have participated in the challenge, with more joining each year.
Escapril is by no means the first write-a-poem-a-day challenge, but it feels fresh and bright, like its founder, Savannah Brown, a twenty-something writer with two published poetry collections and two novels under her belt. Talking about Escapril to Obscur Magazine, she said, “I wanted to create a sort of centralized and curated community space and reliable hashtags people could use to connect with others participating. People have really rallied behind it—I’ve seen pamphlets of Escapril poems, collaborations, young poets using it as a tool to build their audiences.” Furthermore, the challenge is rooted in social media, which inherently draws in a younger demographic of readers and writers.
On Escapril’s official Instagram page, @escapril, Brown refers to herself as its “friendly managerial ghost.” “I try to be as hands-off with Escapril as I possibly can and do my best to refrain from imposing my own will onto any part of it, including the prompts,” she told The Luna Collective. “The prompts always take a while to put together…I spend time considering what will inspire people, or what ideas might be more challenging to explore, and how it all affects the pacing of the month.”
https://www.instagram.com/letsescapril/
I spoke with a few college students who have participated in Escapril. Armaan Bamzai, an English major in his first year at Columbia University, has done the challenge for all of its four years. As a seasoned writer who has been published in multiple magazines and his high school’s newspaper as well as serving on the board of Columbia’s literary journal, he finds that Escapril has helped him create a more consistent writing routine. “I enjoy discipline and incorporating that into writing has reoriented my thinking,” he told me. “It’s a work, like any other.”
Bamzai’s friend Rohini Sarkar, a freshman majoring in fashion design at Parsons School of Design, joined him for Escapril in 2020. In the past she has participated in Inktober, a similar drawing-a-day for the month of October, but she said that writing was “completely new” for her. She was excited by the opportunity to explore a new medium with friends. With Inktober, her artistic training helps her feel confident sharing her art on her Instagram page, @clrmoirose, but with Escapril, she found that she was more comfortable keeping her work within the circle of her close friends who were also participating. By the end of the month, she had developed more faith in her writing skills and cultivated a “comfortable, safe space” with her friends that made the month extra fun.
Bamzai and Sarkar agree that writing thirty consecutive poems also helped them discover their personal writing voice. “It was really interesting to see trends in my work,” said Sarkar. “I didn’t even know I had a style but everyone does!”
Bamzai surprised himself with his ability to continue finding new things to write about even at the end of the month. “If you keep scraping, there really is no bottom of the barrel,” he mused. “For me it was often finding creative joy in unexpected places, which is a wonderful feeling.” Furthermore, Bamzai found that posting his poetry helped him see how others perceived them, realizing a new facet of his writing.
Still, the concept of churning out daily work for the public is daunting, and reflects how social media culture demands that we constantly entertain. Brown did not intend for the challenge to be a perfect poem every day—rather, she emphasizes consistent practice and releasing judgment of imperfection.
The Struggles of Writing on Social Media
Sarkar (and I) both chose to keep our poetry more private, only showing our close friends. This technically violates Escapril rules two and three, but it got me thinking about the nature of writing with the intent of sharing. “I would be a lot more censored [if I posted my work], which I would not like,” Sarkar said. “I would like to be more honest.”
Is it possible to be truly honest on a platform like Instagram that fundamentally feels disconnected and performative?
Still, there are benefits to sharing your writing, especially during Escapril. It is a great way to hold yourself accountable and stay motivated to complete the challenge. Consistently posting your work on Instagram can help build up your engagement and following, leading to a supportive community that can provide valuable feedback and validation. Knowing that your writing will have an audience also encourages us to pay attention to detail and polish pieces more fully than we might otherwise.
Posting any writing on social media is a form of self-publication that necessitates navigating modern dynamics. For example: which platform will you use—a spoken-word video on TikTok or a screenshot of an iPhone note on Instagram? Will you use your personal account or create a specific account for your work? Will you share your poetry as a post on the grid or a temporary 24-hour ‘story?’ All of these decisions feed into the final product, and any form of publication acts as a way to legitimize and formalize your work—which is ultimately empowering for any writer.
In the same way that the rise in poets publishing on Instagram has changed the platform’s landscape, Instagram is also changing the landscape of poetry. For example, Rupi Kaur popularized the use of a short minimalistic style that has come to be known as ‘Instagram poetry.’ Daltin Danser, a first-year global studies major and poet at The New School, pointed out, “To have a text-based medium that is finding a home in a visual-based platform…in that context, it makes sense what kind of poetry, such as Rupi Kaur’s, gets preferred or emboldened by that platform.” In other words, Instagram’s emphasis on aesthetics influences poets’ use of form, space, and even drawings.
Danser points out that this simplistic style “speaks to the culture of Instagram” and our “short attention spans [and] a need for things to be succinct and have an obvious beauty as opposed to something that may be more complicated to sort through.” This isn’t necessarily a positive or negative thing: it simply reflects how social media influences our thinking and therefore the types of writing that appeal to us.
The literary value of this form of Instagram poetry has been hotly debated, creating a stigma around all poetry posted on Instagram. In particular, poets such as Kaur are more closely scrutinized simply for being young women (and sometimes not white) and having a reader base that is also primarily young women. Female-dominated fields tend to be minimized, and social media posts are often not seen as valid, serious ways to share art. However, Bamzai warns against writing off Instagram as a publishing platform, pointing out that it can be as serious as the writer wants it to be. Additionally, by eliminating a formal publisher, the writer has full autonomy over their work, which can be empowering.
If you do choose to participate in Escapril, welcome! Here is some tried-and-true advice:
- Get some friends to join you! Creating a safe community of trusted writers makes it more fun and you can hold each other accountable to get through the month.
- Brown: “Read outside of your comfort zone, read actively; try copying other poets as practice to see how it makes you feel.”
- If you’re feeling uninspired or stumped by a prompt, go through the Escapril hashtags and tagged photos to explore other people’s interpretations and formats.
- It can help to write during a certain time of day, such as right when you wake up or before going to sleep—or not! Danser recommends writing down a phrase or idea whenever it comes to mind, then synthesizing them when you have time. Explore what works for you.
- Sarkar: “Don’t take yourself too seriously and don’t be hard on yourself if it’s not a good product at the end of every day. As long as you get something out of the experience, either a body of work or maybe you learned a new skill, that’s something to be proud of.”
- It’s a marathon, not a sprint! So focus on creating sustainable writing habits over perfect final products.
As for sharing your work on social media:
- Bamzai: “Sharing your first poem is the hardest obstacle and after that, it’s much easier. You’ll realize that the world didn’t end after you did it and, in fact, the response was wonderful.” If you’re on the fence about sharing, do it!
- Push your comfort zone while also respecting your boundaries. Poetry is vulnerable and you can share as much or as little feels right to you.
In any creative challenge, Bamzai says, “If it stops feeling wonderful and magical and fun to you, push yourself, keep going, and if you still feel uninspired…it’s okay to take that break, it’s okay to come back to it later.” Don’t let the pressure to be constantly creating take you away from your honest voice and love of writing—at the end of the day, the joy of creating something is more important than a challenge.
You can read Bamzai’s work at @armaan.jpeg and Danser’s work at @daltin.danser on Instagram.