Reading #Instapoetry

James Mackay is Associate Professor of Literature and Digital Cultures at European University Cyprus. JuEunhae Knox is Teaching Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK.

• AcknowledgementsList of FiguresIntroductionJuEunhae Knox (University of Sheffield, UK) and James Mackay (European University, Cyprus)Chapter 1. E-Lit’s #1 Hit: Is Instagram Poetry E-literature?Kathi Inman Berens (Portland State University, USA)Chapter 2. #Tagged: Hashing Meaning through Poe(t/m)-taggingJuEunhae Knox (University of Sheffield, UK)Chapter 3. Missed Possibilities from Unobtainable Data: The Case of Instapoetry and a Wish to Go Beyond Rupi KaurCamilla Holm Soelseth (Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway) and Eleonora Natalia Ravizza (University of Catania, Italy)Chapter 4. “Poetry is about people seeing themselves”: An Interview with Kirsty MelvilleJames Mackay (European University, Cyprus) and JuEunhae Knox (University of Sheffield, UK)Chapter 5. Instant Confessions Yara Gawrieh Ekmark (independent scholar)Chapter 6. ‘Former Contours’: Posts, (Post) Pregnancy, and Re/turning to Creative ProcessesLaura Tansley (University of Glasgow, UK)Chapter 7. “The Floodgates Have Been Opened”: Instapoetry and the Recentering of Marginalized PoetsLaura Gallon (University of Sussex, UK)Chapter 8. ‘Fat, Fly, Brown Poet’: Yesika Salgado, Instapoetry, and Politics in the Undergraduate ClassroomMaria Carla Sanchez (University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA)Chapter 9. “Healing is Everyday Work”: Instapoetry, Intimate Publics, and the Language of Self-HelpMillicent Lovelock (University of Manchester, UK)Chapter 10. Poetry-by-Numbers: Machine-Generating InstapoetryRyan Prewitt (Saint Louis University, USA) and Max Accardi (independent scholar)Chapter 11. How to Be a Successful #instapoet: Defying Jean Baudrillard’s Hyperreal with Marketing Strategies Based on Hollie McNishMelissa Sarikaya (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)Chapter 12. Platform Poetics: Instapoetry in the Age of PlatformizationZak Bronson and Warren Steele (University of Western Ontario, Canada)Chapter 13. What’s the Carbon Footprint of an (Insta)Poem?: Reading #poetsofinstagram in the AnthropoceneJames Mackay (European University, Cyprus) and Polina Mackay (University of Nicosia, Cyprus)List of ContributorsIndex

Reading #Instapoetry attends to the complex developments of Instapoetry and the Instapoet, highlighting the cultural significance of the genre, as well as the aesthetic, political, and consumerist difficulties it presents. This edited collection is a timely examination of a phenomenon that is notoriously slippery, caught in the machinations of celebrity, social media, and publishing. Instapoetry is marked by the demands of the algorithm and the wildly diverging responses of critics and readers; as the collection makes clear, it thus offers unsettling and contested spaces, as it speaks to the anxieties of literary culture, to questions about craft, originality and the author, and to ongoing debates about identity, particularly in relation to ethics, the commodification of the personal, and the marketing of marginalized voices. Reading #Instapoetry captures these central concerns of the genre and more; it is a remarkable scholarly contribution to understanding such an intriguing and subversive poetic form.