What the Triumph of Instapoetry Tells Us About the Decline of Modern Language

Poetry is everywhere and nowhere. But mostly nowhere.

Joe-Francis Kiaga

Whether you like it or not, the publication of Rupi Kaur’s poetry collection Milk and Honey is a significant moment in the history of poetry. In an age where poetry had been for some time almost culturally irrelevant, the collection became a NYT bestseller, Forbes listed her as one of our “emerging artists” and in 2019, The New Republic declared Kaur “Writer of the Decade.” She has 4.4 million Instagram followers and has appeared on mainstream American television, reciting one of her poems on the Jimmy Fallon show, the clip of which has over 2 million views.

With this has come a myriad other highly successful ‘Instapoets’ who have copied and pasted Kaur’s template, popularising themselves on Instagram and using her precise formula of short sentence long poems on a page surrounded by doodles, a trend that has included celebrities, YouTubers and influencers. Poetry, I guess, is back.

Outrage, critiques, mockery and memes of Kaur’s poetry abound, and I am not going to waste space here piling on (I’ve already done that enough), but suffice to say the most sensationalism-free response is that given by poet Don Paterson in an article responding to a slightly adjacent debacle about spoken word poets, in which he referenced off hand the fact that Kaur is someone “few poets consider a poet at all.”

Kaur is writing poetry in so far as anything is poetry: fridge magnets, gift cards, Tweets, advertising slogans, and so on. Avoiding the temptation to mockery, it is a simple observation that Kaur’s work is simply the slightly ‘arty’ visualisation of Instagram captions, and since it lacks any consciousness of form, trope, or any conscious or learned use of language or tradition whatsoever, calling it ‘poetry’ seems a backhanded insult to poetry as a craft.

That is not to enforce an artistic snobbery. Art should be democratic at least to some extent, and sometimes timeless songs are written by people who know only a handful of chords. But those songs require at least a basic recourse to craft (the chords at least) and reflect the fact that talent is sometimes given; as much as it infuriates those who spend their life learning, some people just have natural talent. People can write great poetry with minimal immersion in tradition or education about form and style because they simply have a natural gift for the feel of the sonic elements of language and its rhythms, or an ability to use metaphor effectively without ‘trying’.

But the issue is that this latter fact can be evaluated. It is often the case that the greatest artists can’t exactly tell you why they are doing what they do, they work in intuition and feel, and it is in later evaluation that they or others can consider why the effect works, or that it does work, or how they were doing what they were doing. In other words, for the artist much of creation is unconscious, and for the critic it works the other way around.

This is where Instapoetry falls short of being poetry, not because of snobbery about what can or can’t be considered part of an establishment, but because there really is nothing to evaluate. This is not someone who only knows a few chords and has written a great song, this is someone who has hit a single piano note three times and declared it to be music — if it is music, it is only by the technicality that any intentional sound is music, and its reasons for popularity lie elsewhere than the music. Kaur’s poems are simply descriptive statements, they do not signify or use metaphor in any greater extent than ordinary speech (actually, less, we’ll get to that), they seem to be spaced almost arbitrarily, and there is nothing in them that we can really say anything at all about. Take one:

and here you are living
despite it all.

Or this one:

stay
i whispered
as you
shut the door behind you

To emphasise: these are not excerpts from poems but the entire poems. I wish only to observe the point that these poems are absent of anything that makes poetic language not just fall into the category we can call poetry but also lack anything that makes poetry interesting or even enjoyable, even dare I say transcendent as a craft and an art form.

But what is important here is that Kaur’s poems are extremely popular, and are considered seriously by plenty of people one would imagine should know better. The question is what exactly it tells us about a certain slice of our modern culture and the way the language embodies concepts of the self which as it turns out are strangely, un-poetically literal.

What is interesting first about Kaur’s poems is that there are almost no metaphors. This is a fascinating thing to consider. Even our common speech is brimmed with references to metaphor (ideas are food: ‘they really swallowed that’, ‘let me chew it over’, time is money: ‘how did you spend the day?’ and so on) and also our humour or expressions are often filled with metaphor and language trope. The fact that Kaur’s poems contain no metaphor or trope at all, is worth lingering upon.

Consider some of these poems:

i tend to forget who i am
when i’m constantly around other people

or

you whisper
i love you
what you mean is
i don’t want you to leave

They describe observations about herself, making them essentially personal aphorisms: attempts to encapsulate some common feeling or observation about yourself in a pithy sentence format. Fridge magnets. (Although I would point out that even those silly fridge magnets involve some mildly conscious use of language, my parents have one that says “Sometimes I wake up grumpy, sometimes I let him sleep.” The second part of the sentence transfers grumpy from an adjective to a noun by putting him in apposition with it and changes the whole meaning of the sentence, it achieves its intention of being humorous and silly and as far as its use of language at least qualifies as poetry in a more meaningful way than Kaur’s aphorisms, but that’s by the by.) Even that perhaps seems too much, since they are less universal aphoristic statements than descriptions of momentary feelings, descriptive and entirely personal.

The absence of metaphor here has a deep relation to the modern concept of self, a relation not sufficiently picked up on in our evaluations of modern art and culture. Kaur has something in common with pop artists like Taylor Swift, who writes what you might call me-music, in which the sole referent is oneself. What is absent here is the mystery or consideration of what is primary to the surface level evaluation of experience, the ‘I’m happy’ or ‘I’m sad’ observations, the question that floats beneath those questions: ‘Who am I? What does experience mean?’

The paradox of the modern self is a simultaneous absolute and exclusive obsession with ourselves, a ‘me’ culture, and a complete lack of consciousness of the utter mystery of what it means to even consider what that self is. Why this is so seems to have a relation to Kaur’s lack of metaphorical language: Since the self is not a ‘thing,’ and since identification with is in everything we do, our access to our understanding of ourselves and our representation of ourselves remains primarily metaphorical. In short, without metaphor in any form we are simply blind to ourselves.

In one of her poems, called “to all young poets” Kaur pretty much says what I have about what she is doing:

your art
is not about how many people
like your work
your art
is about
if your heart likes your work
if your soul likes your work
it’s about how honest
you are with yourself
and you
must never
trade honesty
for relatability

The idea is that authentic self-expression is the main goal, thus she might as well just say “your art is about you.” Wait, I forgot to do it as a poem:

your art
is about
you.

Sorry, I’m bashing again. But Kaur uses the word ‘art’, and it is important to consider the extent to which the word art has drifted towards meaning self-expression, rather than anything transcendent of individual authenticity such as craft, beauty, aesthetics, form, meaning, or anything else at all.

She says you should not trade honesty for relatability, but this is an appalling statement for an artist. Surely the purpose of art is exactly in relatability, or at least in some transference of your ‘honesty’ beyond celebrating the fact that you are being honest. Art is about relations, relations between the symbols, sounds, words within it, and relation between one another across a culture. Honesty may be important to some degree, but artists also use art as a veil and a symbol, as a way of guarding from the cloying nature of ‘honest’ self expression. Self expression does not transfigure, it mires us in banality. It does not relate. Kaur’s advice to young poets is ironically advice for how to guarantee your art will be bad.

And this advice only works if all your ‘art’ is about yourself in the most narcissistic sense. If I write a poem about a beautiful tree or a landscape, what does it matter if I’m ‘honest?’ If I’m trying to pursue an insight about relationships through language and metaphor, even if it uses my own experience, why is honesty most important? Poetry can involve storytelling which involves fiction, and even accounts of one’s own life must involve at least some kind of fictionalising. Why on earth should ‘art’ be about some kind of literal diaristic account of your own feelings about things? Where does this idea even come from?

Part of the root lies in the fact that Kaur’s choice of form is actually an immensely difficult one to master. Writing with no structure at all in a sentence format is something almost no poets would write in because of the difficultly of actually saying anything in such a small space. Any metaphor has to do an immense amount of work, and there is little room for anything like a volta, a turn in which a theme or metaphor reshifts the emphasis within the poem. There is room for almost nothing, and without any small form itself (Haiku for example) there is little effect produced by free verse that makes it discernible from a random sentence.

Let me emphasise that last point. I have here on my desk a random book I read recently, a popular book on neuroscience called Behave by Dr Robert Sapolsky. Let me open it at random a few times and put half of whatever sentence I see first in Kaur’s style:

obedience
is closely intertwined
with conformity

a challenging implication
of kin selection
arises

what to do
with this void
of information?

As you can see, if you luck out with a sentence not too context dependant you can produce something that feels Kaur like. The last one you could suggest sounds like a haunting poem for the internet age, and all I did was randomly open a book and pick out a sentence. The middle one is slightly too specific, the first one sounds like some kind of generic aphorism. This is literally all Kaur is doing except with statements about herself, formatting random sentences and posting them as declarative profundities.

Ok. So can you do better in such a small space? Most poets, apart from occasional ventures into Haikus would say only with great difficulty, because most poets know that effect is produced by trope, and squeezing trope into such a small space is hard to actually make effective. Here are a couple of examples, first In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

And another called An August Night by Seamus Heaney:

His hands were warm and small and knowledgable.
When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets,
Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.

Heaney in this poem about his late Father conjures multiple metaphors in two sentences. The ferrets in a field, moonlight as a symbol of the memory or dream in which he is encountering his Father, his ‘knowledgeable’ hands. The poem is full of assonance, short e sounds shuffle through the poem: ferrets, when, them, themselves. Warm and small extend the feel of the first sentence before you pause at knowledgeable. In two short sentences Heaney is doing an incredible amount of work to achieve his effect. This is also his shortest poem by some margin.

Notice also that while the writer ‘I’ appears in the poem, and the poem ultimately contains personal themes of grief and memory, it isn’t exactly a poem about me. All its effect is transcendent of the person, it does not move you by simply describing feelings as a way of signifying what you are meant to feel, but evokes it in metaphor, imagery, form, symbol, shape, structure. This is the difference between a sentence and a poem.

Given the widespread poverty of such language among modern forms of culture, we must ask the question: why is this renouncement of metaphor such a problem for self understanding?

Up until about half a century ago every person who has ever existed has been “religious.” Religious is in quotations because the word is itself a medieval Christian concept that sees a divide between a thing or practice we call religion and the rest of life, born out of the division made by the church between the religio of the sacred rituals of the church and the saeculum, the cycles of profane existence from which comes our word secular. For many outside of this modern concept as it has evolved, religion has just been the belief in what is, and many other societies do not have a corresponding word, as they do not for our word ‘culture’.

Which is to say that metaphor, if we can call it that, has been seamless with self understanding. ‘Myth’ and poetry have always been interconnected, and in the West everything from Greek myths to Arthurian ‘histories’ to Troy to the bible have been used as storehouses for poetic archetypes and axioms, symbols for the self. Carl Jung’s observation that across myth and religions there are archetypal symbols that appear reflects the fact that these myths are not just arbitrary or ‘just’ stories, calling them ‘just’ myth or ‘just’ metaphor isn’t good enough. They are how we know ourselves.

In an age of relentless rationalisation we also find ourselves in an age where everything is literalised. If a symbol cannot be said in a direct, denotative, immanently predictive form then it is to be rejected as untrue, meaning that stories, poetry, art, and every other aspect of culture becomes something arbitrary, something we do for some pleasure but that lacks any inherent truth or meaning. If you like poetry that’s nice for you, but it’s a hobby no different to fishing or yoga. The idea that it maps across our collective psychology, and that what ‘we’ create says something about us is no longer taken seriously.

That is not to say that all art must or has always been religious, but that it has always partaken in this aspect, and a gradient exists across religious stories and common bar room rhymes or songs, making them different only in degree. Both tell us about ourselves, and we see the world through them.

What ‘we’ today then are seeing the world through, if by ‘we’ we assume that culture implicates us all to some degree, is a set of statements about our own emotions. There is no longer any partaking in what historian of religion Mircea Eliade called Illud Tempus, the transcendent time in which the mythic exists, the narrative forms and symbols that represent what continues after we are gone and shaped us before we were here.

It is this partaking that allows us to understand the way in which the world is composed of meaning as much as it is composed of objects, things or feelings. In a linguistic sense we are bereft of meaning because our language does not partake in it, either in the sense of metaphor as a function through which language itself produces revelations by combination, or in the sense of a partaking of myth and stories as symbols. We are materialist in every sense of the word, metaphysically and economically, Rupi Kaur representing both an empty metaphysic and a person whose success depends on the commodification of her ‘art.’

Philosopher and neuroscientist Dr Iain McGilchrist sees this condition as the subordinating of the right hemisphere of the brain to the left, an inversion of perspective in which the whole is no longer seen for the part that seems to be increasingly predominant in a materialistic society. Literal language allows little of the transcendent perspective required to enter into the more intuitive and felt sense of things as they are instead of things as we catagorise and rationalise them. Poetry is one of the ways we can and have been able to do this through language, and remains a path for us beyond the great loss of sublime perspective that characterises our modern existence. We need it now more than ever.

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