by Huma Qureshi

The Gaurdian : Monday 23 November 2015 

Mobbed at signings, followed by millions and topping the bestseller lists: Instapoets such as Lang Leav, Rupi Kaur and Tyler Knott Gregson are poetry’s new superstars, publishing their love poems and haiku on social media. But are they any good?

 Rupi Kaur’s first collection, Milk & Honey, was an Amazon bestseller. Photograph: Rupi Kaur/Instagram

In 2013, Lang Leav self-published a small debut poetry collection, Love & Misadventure, online. Two years later, she was meeting her fans on a book tour in the Philippines. “It was insane,” she says. “The organisers had to limit each signing to 500 people per session … and I was being escorted by armed guards.” Many queued for hours, some camping out overnight for a chance to meet her.

 Poet Lang Leav … ‘Having three international bestsellers has gone beyond my wildest dreams’

Leav is one of a new generation of bestselling poets catapulted to celebrity – and coveted book deals – through the use of social media, and the huge followings they have built up. Dubbed the “Instapoets”, they have thousands upon thousands of followers hooked on their every post across Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter – and they defy the age-old preconception that it is not possible to make a living out of being a poet.

Leav had around 50,000 followers on Tumblr when she published her first collection. Her poems on love and heartbreak sold close to 10,000 copies in one month and she soon had a powerful literary agent and a deal with a US publisher. Her third collection, Memories, was published last month, and her books have now sold more than 300,000 copies in the space of three years. Love & Misadventure remains the top-selling book of love poems on Amazon and Lullabies is ranked fourth. “I always knew I would do something with books,” she says, “but having three international bestsellers has gone beyond my wildest dreams.”

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According to the New York Times, three of the top 10 bestselling poetry books in the US at present have been written by poets at the forefront of the Instapoet movement. Leav, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand, grew up in Australia and now lives in New Zealand, is one of them; the other two most popular Instapoets of the moment are Rupi Kaur and Tyler Knott Gregson. All of them wear their hearts on their sleeves and write lyrically on themes of love, loss and loneliness.

Rather than fill their Instagram feeds purely with selfies, they take photos of snippets of their poetry, sometimes handwritten or typed in black and white, and they receive thousands of likes for each one from fans all over the world. Thousands more unpublished would-be poets are attempting to do the same and posting their efforts, good and bad, under various hashtags like #instapoetry or #instagrampoetry.

Kaur, an artist and poet who lives in Toronto, says on her website that she writes about the “experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity”. She alreadymade headlines through her Instagram account earlier this year, when she posted a picture of herself in bed with a small amount of menstrual blood staining her pyjamas and sheets, a photograph which Instagram temporarily banned.

Now though, her feed is mostly about her writing. Her latest Instagram poem reads: “i am sorry this world / could not keep you safe / may your journey home / be a soft and peaceful one.” It is accompanied by her hand-drawn illustration of a globe, countries hit by terror attacks marked with little black hearts. At the time of writing, it had received 33,300 likes.

Kaur’s poetry collection, Milk & Honey, was an Amazon bestseller when it was first released last year. Like Lang, she began by self-publishing her work; the pair now share the same publisher, Andrews McMeel. On her website, she writes (all in lower case, as is her style): “there was no market for poetry about trauma abuse loss love and healing through the lens of a punjabi-sikh immigrant woman. so i decided to self publish. even though everyone said not to cause doing so would lock me out of prestigious literary circles.”

Knott Gregson used to be a copywriter. For the last six years, he has been writing haiku on love every single day and posting photographs of them on his social media accounts online, either scribbled on Post-it notes or typed on to crumpled pieces of paper (he is also a photographer). “The resilience / the tireless endurance / for love we deserve,” he writes in one post (3,811 likes at the time of writing). “Gentle in the night / your hands, swimming through the sheets / wash up on my skin,” (3059 likes).

Gregson’s first book, Chasers of the Light, made the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers list in the Wall Street Journal. He now has a second, and features in women’s magazines: the kind of mainstream success that isn’t usually associated with poets.

Leav says she only began “getting serious” with Instagram at the start of this year. Her combined overall social media following, including Facebook and Twitter, is now close to a million. She spends around three hours a day interacting with her readers and followers on social media, but says she doesn’t feel any pressure to keep up with her online presence. “It doesn’t feel like work to me because I love interacting with my readers. It has become a natural part of my day, and something I look forward to.”

One of her most recent Instagram posts included an extract from her latest book: “The days catapult before me,” it begins. “The world is spinning too quickly. It gets harder and harder to retrace my steps. To figure out how I got to be here.” “The words you put together, it is simply amazing!” writes one follower. “So perfect,” says another. Among her most liked posts is a poem called He and I: “When words run dry / he does not try / nor do I / We are on par / He just is / I just am / and we just are”.

Despite their popular success, the Instapoets’ style of angsty heartbreak poetry and daily outpourings of emotion is not to everyone’s taste. Nor do they undergo the same rigorous revising processes of more conventional poets. Gregson has said he never edits his 17-syllable haiku – “because it felt like betraying the exact emotion of the time” – and Leav says anything she posts online should be considered a first draft.

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So, does Instapoetry live up to literary critique? “It’s important to remember that poetry is not just about the uncontrolled expression of how you feel, but how you shape that expression,” says Rishi Dastidar, assistant editor at the poetry magazine, the Rialto. “What makes you a poet is learning the craft, spending time reading other poets and bringing writerly tools to the emotions you are trying to convey. I think it’s great if people are enjoying poetry through social media but the next step would be to read more poetry and understand what else is out there. Contemporary poets offline are incredibly vibrant – it’s just directing people into that world.”

Still, the Instapoets are doing what surely every poet wants to achieve: connecting with and moving their readers – and achieving commercial success with it.

“It’s actually a great subversion of the debates on narcissism and self-obsession which always accompany social media,” says Dastidar. “Posting a poem instead of a selfie means you are asking people to engage with you at a deeper level, and that sort of subversion is part of poetry’s tradition.”