Chris McCabe on Instagram Poetry For Every Day

Having put out a call for submissions the library was duly met with over a thousand entries.

Although there was only enough room to display a fraction of these poems in the Library a seed had been sown, and in 2020 the National Poetry Library, with publisher Laurence King, published the world’s first anthology of Instagram Poetry, Instagram Poetry For Every Day.

Visual, visceral, short and relatable, the poems within the anthology embrace contemporary themes of mental health, women’s empowerment, racial prejudice, gender diversity and political turmoil, as well as those perennial poetic preoccupations of sex, love and loss.

Edited by Jessica Atkinson and National Poetry Librarian Chris McCabe, the book compiles over 100 poems by some of the most exciting artists and poets to emerge from Instagram in recent years. Featured across the anthology’s pages are poets such as Nikita Gill, Brian Bilston, Christopher Poindexter and Tim Key, visual artist Robert Montgomery and performance artist Travis Alabanza.

The featured works are divided into sections focused on different emotions, which can be dipped into or read from start to finish.

To get a better feel for the anthology, and the genre of Instagram Poetry we spoke to National Poetry Librarian, and one of the book’s editors, Chris McCabe.

The motto for National Poetry Day 2020 was ‘see like a poet’. What does that mean to you?

It means reclaiming the visuality of the poem. Often the first thing we notice when we look at a poem are the strange line breaks which shout from the page ‘I’m a poem!’. With Instapoetry, this visuality is paramount as the poems only come into being when being photographed. Invented by the Victorians, ‘photopoetry’ is now having a huge renaissance through Instagram.

What surprised you about compiling this book?

That Instapoetry isn’t what the critics tell you it is. I discovered that Instagram is a vessel for multiple different kinds of poetry – nature, lyric, political, concrete, blackout – as well as a space for celebrated artists working in the hinterlands of poetry to connect. I have started to think of the subtitle of the book as ‘So much more than Rupi Kaur’.

Have you got a favourite poem in the book?

It would be hard to pick a favourite, there are so many great things here, but I’ll go for the one that makes me happiest: ‘the cosmic song of the universe’ by Adriana Olívėra. She says: ‘Even when I make collages that don’t contain words, I can see poetry there’.

Which poet ‘from history’ would enjoy the format of instapoetry the most?

William Blake. His ‘Illuminated Books’ would have looked great backlit by Android.

As writers, what can we learn from instapoetry?

To be bolder with sharing our work in process. So much of the work in the book was originally posted by poets and artists showing what they had created that day, or trying out a new creative approach altogether and making it public.

Don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?

There’s an artist who combined the textual and visual! Now you’ve got me thinking of Bowie’s ‘Verbasizer’ software, which he developed in the 1990s to generate the lyrics for his Outside album. Bowie would add sentences to the Verbasizer, which the software would then randomise, creating poetic lyrics. It’s important to remember that digital doesn’t just provide a platform for creativity, it can also be used as a vital source of creativity. What Bowie said about the Verbasizer – ‘You end up with a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other’ – also holds true for the approach of so many Instapoets.