Photo: David M Benett/Getty Images.
Poet Nikita Gill built a following on Instagram.
It’s funny but the poetry slams I’ve written about before — hip-hop-like, shouted performances that showcased new, nontraditional poets — already seem like a stage in literary history. And their significance seems to lie in their emphasis on connecting with audiences, getting “in your face.” No distancing “poet voice” for these folks!
Social media, too, is all about the need for connection, and that is where you’ll find the newest poets building audiences.
Ella Risbridger has some opinions at the Guardian.
“The death of poetry – much anticipated, much prematurely mourned – has been put off again, this time by the Odyssey. Thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film, sales of Homer’s epic rose 1,400% in the weeks around release – and it’s not alone. Poetry collections are once again sailing up the charts: Lucas Jones, Donna Ashworth and Nikita Gill, among others, have all burst forth on to the bestseller lists. …
“Poetry is a genre more often relegated to the adolescent, the academic, or the words inside sentimental birthday cards: either over-emotional or elitist, depending on which poet and which perspective. What it certainly is not is a money-spinner: nobody gets into poetry to make the big bucks. Nobody gets into poetry – not these days, anyway, not since Byron’s day – for the fame or the fortune.
“Poetry is the underdog of publishing and yet this year, according to a recent Guardian article, it is ‘expected to exceed £15m [$20 m] in annual sales for the first time since records began.’ … Even without the bolstering influence of Homer, poetry has been steadily climbing for the last three years, each one the best on record.
“In fact, reports of poetry’s surprising rise have been kicking around for more than a decade: Rupi Kaur’s million-dollar debut, Milk and Honey, set new records in 2014, and continues to sell. US magazine the New Republic named Kaur the ‘writer of the decade.’ And yet she came to stand not so much for great art, as for a kind of synecdoche for what was wrong with art: Kaur became the mockable face of ‘the new poetry.’ …
“A new audience is finding poetry, particularly (though not exclusively) through social media: a new generation of poets, particularly but not exclusively performance poets, have come to prominence through Instagram, TikTok, and other short-form video formats. These writers, while we can quote them on the page, lose something by being written down.
“ ‘At my funeral I’d like there to be sunflowers, a truly inconvenient amount / For I too will have spent a lifetime searching for the light,’ runs a couplet from Harry Baker’s ‘Sunflowers,’ but the poet’s charismatic presence somehow conveys something more of the full power of his meaning.
“Many of these poems, beginning on social media and ending in huge sold-out tours, rely on a connection between speaker and listener: a pause, a stillness, a sustained thread in the chaos of the internet, of singular attention to one poem through to the end.
“This is poetry for the social media age, for sure. But then, what is the Odyssey except social media [meant] to be read out loud; to be told; to be spread; to be shared. …
“It is tempting to think of these bestsellers as a new kind of poetry, but it is in fact a very old one. It is unafraid of emotion, of sentimentality, of faith and love; it is concerned less with the establishment of a brand new voice than with the need to give voice to a collective thought. It is not about originality. (Hence, perhaps, the accusations of self-help; banality; and even plagiarism that have been flung at some of these newly popular poets.) These are poems designed to resonate rather than to disturb. In times of division, these poems are made to connect.
“All writing is about connection, even when it’s not. But the immediacy of the connection between author and reader is somehow easiest in poetry: when it works, there’s a direct shot to the heart, a human-to-human hot-wiring together that compresses time and space to get to the point.
“What social media offers these poets is a new way to gather people round the fire – and, for some, a way to get to be the one speaking at last. If poets can reach their audiences directly, then different poets may be, perhaps, given a chance not just to speak but to be heard: working-class poets, queer poets, poets who don’t fit the … classical canon.”
Read up on “five bestselling poets you should know about” at the Guardian, here. No paywall.
