by Meredith MacLeod Davidson
In the 1640s, two definitions of the verb engage branched from its etymology tree.1
The first: engage (v.) – “to attract and occupy the attention of”
The second: engage (v.) – “to enter into combat or contest with”
At nineteen, I had logins on many major image-hosting or sharing sites: Flickr, Imgur, Tumblr, Founddd. There was a sort of social currency in being a curator of images online—I curried favor and acclaim amongst my friends both real and on Facebook for the unique and compelling images I collected and dispersed strategically across digital channels. I stocked the bulk of my fresh undergraduate laptop with saved images; my father bought me an external hard drive for schoolwork.
There was something romantic about the image online, then, and now.
I was twenty when Instagram was first released. At twenty, my best friend was my roommate: a mercurial chemical-blonde a year older than me from the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina. She was inordinately wealthy, her father and stepmom were executives for a major grocery chain in the United States.
At twenty-one, my best friend and I both suffered depressions—experiences we would not have the language for—she ever, me for quite some time.
We came together in our misery—company obscuring the ails.
We spent many a night drunk together in her bed, or mornings crying on the cold tile of our shared bathroom floor. When we grew desperate, she would drive us on her hot pink moped to the McDonald’s parking lot to devour pockets of french fries or pick up an entire sheet cake from the nearest grocery store to take from sheet to fork to mouth on our front porch.
I look through my Instagram archive today and there are echoes of these experiences filtered through the photographs: a vignette focused on the gouge we’d gutted of a birthday cake, date stamped at least three months off from either of our actual birthdays; a flash of blonde hair swatting the camera in the wind as I clutched her hips between my knees on the back of a motorized scooter. The almost mundane in these immortalized everyday horrors of girlhood motivated these snapshots, but the performance of aesthetic online developed these aching moments to a status of almost beautiful, they do so even a decade later.
When I look at the sun-brightened, then digitally-brightened strip of hair captured curving over the shoulder of my best friend in a whip of wind, of course I think of the reason we were riding out on the moped that day to begin with: a boy had ejaculated inside her without consent the night before, he was not answering texts or phone calls and we urgently had to pick up a pack of Plan B. But my overarching thoughts lend more toward: good god, we were so young, so beautiful, we hadn’t a care in the world.
The performance of aesthetic and the romanticization of the every day has become a staple of the Instagram experience. It is therefore no surprise then that the features of instapoetics—nature metaphor, short verse, simple language, “images of typewritten poems, lack of capitalization or punctuation, and sentences broken over a few lines”—have propelled it to a significant position in the current conversation concerning poetry.2 On Instagram, “The idea seems to be that poets are old-fashioned and romantic and that this romanticism is an appealing deviation to the focus on superficial physical attributes that is common to the rest of Instagram.”3
There is a kind of self-revision that occurs when you translate and transmit something from reality to the Internet; the revision occurs when the experience is converted to a digital image, when it is transferred from an image on your phone and converted to an image on your social media page. Add captions, hashtags, location, filters. The image your followers experience now has been categorized, contextualized, optimized. Yet even with all this contextualization, many of the complaints regarding some of Instagram-poetry’s biggest stars (Rupi Kaur, Atticus, Yrsa Daley-Ward, to name a few) involve, in some capacity, a complaint that their writing feels ill-formed, poorly if at all thought-out.
At thirty-one, I have spent the last four years of my life working in social media marketing—a job I couldn’t have imagined would exist ten years ago when I was, for all purposes, aesthetically documenting my own depression online. I now optimize social media accounts for a living. I survive on the basis of my ability to translate brands, personas, to the Internet. To optimize engagement.
Engagement is the holy grail of social media—the goal is always to increase engagement: getting more and more people to follow, like, comment, share, and save your content.
It is no wonder then that some of the highest performing posts online are “engagement announcements”—the presentation of an image of the moment of the proposal: the classic shot of one with their hands to their face in shock, in excitement, while another is posed on one knee, an unboxed ring pointed upward, a smile dashed across lips. If not this, then the image of the hand, splayed, nails perfectly manicured, a glinting, glowing ring on a finger.
I hadn’t seen B in some time, maybe a few years, when she posted her engagement announcement on Instagram. It was mid-December, I was readying for the holidays. She looked good—her hair freshly colored, she had lost quite a bit of weight—the Instagram economy (and its beauty standards) valued her highly in this moment. I thought again of the boy we had rescued from certain fatherhood with a twenty-dollar box of morning-after pill. I was happy for her, she had found the one. They were engaged.
I commented a quick congratulations on the post. Texted her separately, I’m so happy for you! There is an expectation even amongst close friends for this performance online, for engagement purposes—there is currency in one’s online metrics looking good, if not better, than your performed self. They are, in an online space, arguably interchangeable, or indistinguishable from the other.
I wasn’t expecting a response, but B texted me back the next day. She’d been meaning to reach out—she wanted to tell me something. She sent a series of images: whitish–yellow globules against a murky gray background littered my screen: like an x-ray a toddler had blown a strawful of milk-bubbles across. Those are my tumors. I’ve got ovarian cancer. She said. I think the pictures look kind of cool though.
Maybe the reason the institutions of literature—formal training, academics, “real poets” take issue with instapoetics, is its tenuous position in relation to mortality. If poetry, as an arm of literature, or art, is a practice conducted in some ways in an effort to defy an imminent death, to assert a semblance of permanence where objectively it is impossible—through publication, typically (think of the numerous artists or writers who become posthumously lauded), then perhaps the performance of poetry online is threatening for its tenuous impermanence, the unknown associated with the digital space, which could, in theory, be wiped out in a single act of cyberterrorism, and which feels both terminally permanent and ceaselessly ephemeral all at once.
Art in many ways can be an evasion of mortality. Instapoetics, with their express design for optimal engagement, quick consumption, easy digestibility, and instant meaning-making, perhaps fail to adequately perform this evasion. This failure to evade mortality may threaten those dedicating a lifetime, making a living!, from art.
One month after sending me the photos of her cancer, B died. If that feels sudden, it’s because it was. She was twenty-six, newly engaged. I found out online, which felt apt, if not cruel. The week between her death and her funeral felt like a mad dash for everyone who knew her to perform their grief as grandly as possible online—if we are measuring post-metrics (likes, comments, shares), I performed some of the best grief—my image, captioned, tagged, and executed with a professional’s skill, was widely well-received. I am, after all, a writer, and a social media strategist by trade—if I cannot engage online, then who can?
But I think my post was so well-received because I openly, quite openly in fact, engaged with the complexity of B, and the complexity of our friendship—one often fraught, sometimes cut-off, but always imbued with a degree of love, of appreciation. All those mornings spent crying on our bathroom floor over all our minor rapes were not for naught, perhaps.
Which is ultimately, it seems, what the institutions of poetry want of poets and poetry-readers—engagement. Not in the sense of the word as (v.) attract and occupy the attention of, as is privileged by Instagram, but in the sense of the word as (v). enter into combat or contest with. In our attention economy, attention is fleeting—occupied briefly, then flitting elsewhere, until occupied again. Poetry, however, in canon, craft, composition, reading, and practice, demands an extended combat or contest between the poem and reader, between the poem and writer, between the writer and the reader. The combat can last a lifetime—life changes, time lived allows for readings and interpretations previously impossible to access. A protracted contact with a poem encourages a never-ending layering of complexity, in meaning, emotion, and language. It encourages endless possibility.
The poet writes as both self and second self, the image given online is both self, and another. Instagram poetry may simultaneously be poetry, and not, but it doesn’t particularly matter, especially when the value of poetry is increasingly defined by the commercial value of poetry. When “The internet has muddied the clear water that separates art from commerce,” Instagram poets are perhaps only vilified because they are in fact making a living from their Instapoetics, something many institutional poets aspire to but cannot quite achieve.4 To make a living from poetry, especially online, evokes another illusion of the evasion of mortality, one marketed frequently on Instagram—money can in theory, buy off your death, at least for a time.
Even now, I feel crass using a friend’s death as a vehicle for creative inquiry. And yet, she feels inextricably linked to my own creative pursuits, to my own existence as a person, very real, and very online—and the spaces I occupy that are not distinctly either.
B evoked all sense of engagement from me in the short and intense friendship of our girlhood and young womanhood. She not only attracted and occupied my attention, but she also engaged me in a constant combat or contest—for all the romanticized memory I host at the forefront of my recollection, there are ten times as many toxic, reactive interactions—many of which would result in verbal assaults launched at each other—sometimes in public, petty domestic cruelty (we were roommates after all), or even crueler acts—not liking a photo or a status update on each other’s profiles online.
The inherent structures of social network platforms allow for an immediate sense of connection.
Likely this lent to the greatest connections B and I shared, which came in times of great distance. The summer she spent away in Vietnam we were in constant contact—over, of course, these very social networks. She was close enough that we could relate—share stories of what we were up to, the people we were meeting that summer, but also far enough away that I had not the closeness to interrogate her choices, nor she mine. We were not present enough with each other to feel obligated to or entitled to each other’s behaviors. And perhaps that relates to the appeal of instapoetics—in an attention economy, Instagram poetry has alchemized the feeling of connection, of meaning, without putting one too deep in combat with the text. If every word put to the page reflects the poet’s choices, considered choices, then Instagram poetry puts us just close enough to elicit an emotional response, but not close enough to require an interrogation of choice.
- Online Etymology Dictionary. “engage” https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=engage. Accessed on 4 January 2023. ↩︎
- Paquet, Lili. “Selfie-Help: The Multimodal Appeal of Instagram Poetry.” The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 52, Issue 2, April 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332428398_Selfie-Help_The_Multimodal_Appeal_of_Instagram_Poetry ↩︎
- Paquet, Lili. “Selfie-Help: The Multimodal Appeal of Instagram Poetry.” The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 52, Issue 2, April 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332428398_Selfie-Help_The_Multimodal_Appeal_of_Instagram_Poetry ↩︎
- Kiernan, Anna. “Insta poetry and the politics of emotion.” The Lit Platform, https://theliteraryplatform.com/stories/insta-poetry-and-the-politics-of-emotion/. Accessed on 4 January 2023. ↩︎
Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland, where she earned a master of letters in creative writing from the University of Glasgow. Their poems are published or are forthcoming in The London Magazine, Puerto del Sol, trampset, Cream City Review, and elsewhere; critical writing is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal. Connect with Meredith on Instagram: @mairmacleod.