Instapoetry is a contemporary style of written poetry that emerged alongside the rise of social media—especially platforms like Instagram. This form of poetry is crafted with the intent of being shared online, visually digestible in a feed full of images, quotes, and fleeting attention spans. I am paining myself by trying to learn how to write like this, because the market says I should. It is brief, often emotionally raw, and tailored for immediacy. Instapoetry also appears on platforms such as the X, Tumblr, and TikTok, and more famously, Instagram, spreading quickly, almost virally, and drawing massive followings in the process.

Yet for all its popularity, Instapoetry is frequently criticized—rightly, at times—for its generic language, its lack of originality, and its resemblance to a first draft. How can I really critique? WoPoLi is designed to be a first draft site as well, but for the less popular poet, me. I call this poetry market poetry; it often feels incomplete: a fleeting thought broken into lines, not always for effect but for aesthetics, so that it might look like a poem when scrolled past. The contemporary poetry books I pick up at the bookstore are like this and elicit an “I could write this” reaction—words that many feel I, too, could have jotted down on a napkin or posted late at night. Often, they tell instead of show. They present emotion without transformation, surface pain without poetic alchemy.

I refer to this style, somewhat critically, yet I am striving to learn to write it. It thrives in the economy of relatability and algorithms. This poetry often lacks metaphor, rhythm, and surprise. It is unexperimental. It treads familiar ground with familiar words, mirroring every third poem you’ve already read. It avoids risk and prefers clarity, comfort, and sometimes, cliché. And yet—this poetry circulates. It is consumed. It lives.

Here’s the harder truth: Am I selling out in writing this kind of poetry, too? Of course. I want a little piece of that popularity. However, I won’t call it selling out. I’ll call it experimenting. After all, that is my style, never a “style” per se, but an experiment with every style, even writing my own styles. SO maybe I am not a sell-out, maybe I am just continuing my natural approach to experimentation.

I have written bad poetry as a child, where I hoped that the label “childhood poetry” might offer a shield of compassion, but later, as an adult—after decades of writing and learning and failing and growing. I have now decided to write what I know to be bad poems, and I have done so intentionally.

Why? Because the writing of bad poetry is part of the process. (Actually, it seems like it is the most successful, and being completely unappreciated for my depth, I have decided to try shallow) —Yet with that copout said, one cannot truly explore the depths and forms of poetry without stepping into its shallows, without testing the boundaries of what is considered poor, obvious, or derivative. To write poetry—truly write it—one must risk failure in public. One must be willing to say, here is something imperfect, and let the world take it or leave it. In that act of exposure, even failure becomes a kind of success. (I am also attempting to mimic the success of others, if I am going to be truthful here, cuz the “me” I put in my poetry, my “soul” poetry, my “intellect” poetry is just to damn confusing for 98 percent of the population.)

Somewhere along the way, I am sure I have broken a literary rule—or a hundred. But I have come to see that as my purpose: to break the rules, not for the sake of defiance (well, maybe a little cuz it’s fun) but for the sake of discovery. I write clichés to see what happens when they’re mine. I step into well-worn phrases and hollow metaphors not to inhabit them, but to poke at them from the inside, and perhaps rewrite them into something new. I practice anticipatory plagiarism (no one can accuse me if I say, yep, I did that. I even turned it into a poetry form (check out my book Fusion Poetry)

I have even returned to my own poems—repeating themes across the decades. A poem about fear I wrote as a child became a poem about fear written twenty years later, and then again fifteen years after that. The lines changed slightly, matured, or weathered. Yet the core—like a face changing through age—remained recognizable. I do not choose one version over another. They are all mine. They are all true in different ways.

So here I sit, defending myself not to a critic, but to the imagined voice that questions why I persist in sharing imperfect work. The truth is, I write because I choose to. I experiment because I must. I revisit the same poem across decades because it remains unfinished, like all of us. I write bad poetry not because I misunderstand what makes poetry “good,” but because I understand that bad poems, too, are part of the poetic body.

And when I publish them, I watch—quietly, curiously—to see if the world picks them up, or lets them pass. Either way, I keep writing.