The Ecocritical Instapoet: Digital Media Ecofeminist Poetry

In recent years, a new poetry genre has emerged, currently known as Instapoetry, and its chief practitioners are often young females (Pâquet 2019). Instapoetry has many characteristics influenced by the nature of the Instagram platform on which it is published, such as its brevity and its inclusion of visual effects with the text. However, its resemblance and links to older forms of modernist and post-modernist poetry are undeniable; such as its use of symbolism, expressionism, its move away from tradition, and its sense of activism. The “retrofitting” (Chasar 2020) of modernist poetic themes and formats for a digital medium opens up new possibilities for new ways of thinking. I suggest that this new format which can be seen as restrictive, allows for an opening and for new modes of subjectivity. Instapoetry engages feelings and ideas through an inclusive approach and that is essentially what gives it its potential as an activist and educational facility. Through its penchant for activism, Instapoetry engages in a metamodernist global consciousness shift, which Luke Turner defines as a move away beyond postmodernism and an “emergence of a palpable collective desire for change” (Turner 2015). Female Instapoets often employ nature motifs in their Instapoetry, however, the nature motif is portrayed as something that connects, contrary to the restrictive sense often applied by patriarchal systems. In order to break away from a simplistic reading of Instapoetry as a poetic genre completely closed in by algorithms and word limits and to show the openings that this poetic genre allows, I suggest a new name “Digital Media Ecofeminist Poetry.” I attempt a qualitative methodology, through close reading of various Instapoems by female Instapoets, to demonstrate their nuanced use of form, language, and visuality and I examine the ways in which the digital medium influences this new form of poetry