I’ll Be Brief

My mom thinks that lice just grow spontaneously when your hair is dirty enough. I can’t change her mind.

Dating experts say Halloween is perhaps the best opportunity to find love. 

These days it feels like morality is shoved down my throat. Now I’m a vegetarian.

The Trump administration is making efforts to end government recognition and protections of transgender people.

On Thursday, I picked up a stray kitten.

Apparently the size and shape of the human pelvis varies extremely between different ethnic populations. Following the “European model” of a pelvis leads to birthing complications. 

On Friday, I got a tetanus shot. Ten days of amoxicillin, too.

Patterns and frequency of word use may be an indicator of mental illness.

I asked my sister how married life is—she said every night he asks her permission to play Fortnite with his cousins.

The owner and deliveryman of an Indian restaurant were convicted of manslaughter after the death of a teenager with a nut allergy.

Two years ago my sister refused to vote for Hillary until my dad threatened to cease all financial support.

As Grete Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed in her bed into a praying mantis.

Before Gregory Bush shot and killed two black people outside a grocery story, he looked over to a white man and said, “Whites don’t shoot whites.” The police will not call it a hate crime. 

-Maryam

The Insta-Attraction to Instagram Poetry

(The author of this news brief realizes this isn’t news as much as it’s been a growing phenomenon that piqued her interest after a classmate in her Creative Writing class said he hated Instapoets for cheapening poetry. The author went on later to research why this might be, in the form of this news brief.)

Poetry’s never really been my thing. I’ve performed at a few open mics and wrote a few poems for the Brooklyn College’s literary magazine, Stuck in the Library, but can I put myself up there with Shakespeare, Plath, Neruda, or Eliot, by calling myself a poet? Similarly, I also have an issue with calling myself a novelist. Just a plain writer will do for now.

So I can see why many people have fallen under the spell of Instagram poetry, while also understanding why such writing has accumulated its fair share of critics. Instapoets, while distinct in voice, all share a similar style of succinct, tweet-sized confessional poetry that deals with love, heartbreak, pain, and other topics generally. In that way, Instagram poetry reminds me of horoscopes and astrology – broad terms such as “likes to read” or “is organized” can be relatable to everyone, but can it speak to you on a deeper level?

Take Rupi Kaur or Atticus, two Instapoets that have risen to fame. Both have published two poetry books each – Kaur has written  “Milk and Honey” and “The Sun and her Flowers”; Atticus has written  “Love her Wild” and “The Dark Between Stars.” Their poetry is short, sometimes even to the point of just being a singular sentence. When describing Atticus, Huffington Post said:

“Atticus’ work and persona ― like the work and personas of other popular Instagram poets ― are perfectly calibrated to attract fans: bland, generic, aesthetically pleasing, and therefore the perfect projection screen for readers’ desires. He specializes in the sort of broadly phrased epigrams about love and heartbreak that people eagerly like and share online, often printed over white backgrounds or saturated photos of long-maned, long-legged girls.”

Kaur’s poetry pairs poem to artwork, and delves more into female empowerment and her personal struggles growing up as an immigrant in Canada. But like Atticus’s, Kaur’s poetry never goes into specifics, and has also garnered a huge following through her simplistic, yet provocative words. We can all get behind these ideas of love and the ephemeral ‘she’ or ‘you’ without thinking of metaphors or a potential underlying social context.

After all of this, I’m still not really sure how to define poetry at this point, or what makes a person a poet. These short snippets speak to us universally and encapsulate a minimalist aestheticism that instantaneously grabs us on social media. It’s like the headlines or a refrain in a song – if it sticks to you, then it’s done its job. Instagram poetry isn’t like the Shakespearean sonnets of love and passion or like T. S. Eliot’s epic poetry that waxes on about the cycles of war and life and birth and rebirth. But it’s very much a part of our generation. We’re constantly processing information, stuck to our phones and multitudes of social media applications. Perhaps we don’t have the time to dig deeper. Maybe we just need that one sentence to tell us that being in love is like running in circles. We all know what that feels like, and this can be poetry for us.

-Raisa Alexis Santos