instagram poetry

The recently formed Dutch Digital Literature Consortium – a partnership of researchers from Tilburg University, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Royal Library of the Netherlands and local libraries – aims to develop and launch an online catalogue of digital literature, created in the Netherlands and Flanders, and turn this collection into a publicly accessible digital catalogue. The project draws inspiration from comparable databases, such as the Electronic Literature Collection 1-3, NT2, Hermaneia, and Literatura Electrónica Hispánica. Whereas these databases bring together digital literary projects from a variety of traditions – often with a particular focus –, the project at hand focuses exclusively on works from a specific geographical location (much like collections such as the Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection).The development of such a database gives rise to several theoretical and methodological questions that are central to the study of e-lit: which works and genres are eligible to be included in the database, and on what grounds is this selection made? Practical decisions critically hinge on the fundamental question what digital literature is. This question has been answered – explicitly and implicitly – by different actors and institutions involved with e-lit, such as funding institutions, libraries, and other ‘gatekeepers’. Such institutions are significant because they are responsible for the material and the symbolic production of digital literature. As Yra van Dijk points out, digital works are ‘not autonomous, in the sense that they are in fact funded and sometimes initiated by some institution, mostly in the end by the government itself’ (2012, 2). If, as Florian Cramer claims, ‘electronic literature ha[s] established itself as a field in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, i.e. as an area of production and discourse with intrinsic distinctions and authorities’ (2012, 1), then we need to consider how these authorities push digital literature in specific directions.While acknowledging that digital literature is also a transnational phenomenon, this paper analyses the ways in which institutions shape digital literature in specific techno-cultural contexts. The Low Countries share a language and – to a great extent – a literary tradition, while they also differ significantly culturally and institutionally. When one pays attention to the institutional frameworks, the specificity of the Dutch versus Flemish digital literature tradition is brought into focus. The institutional approach that I advocate thus does not only do justice to the multidimensional and changing nature of digital literature, it also takes into account the differences across linguistic areas and nation states.The question what counts as ‘literature’ is answered differently over time and in specific geographic contexts. The same holds true for the question what belongs to the realm of the ‘digital’. Therefore, this institutional approach is twofold, 1) I examine which digital genres and individual works are considered literary, and 2) I examine what is considered digital within these specific contexts. The theoretical overview of the institutional framework of digital literature in the Low Countries offers a solid starting point for the Consortium’s position on the practical, methodological questions raised above.

(Source: The author's abstract)

Instapoetry is entangled in the ecology of Instagram and the digital media ecology at large, which despite instapoetry’s very conservative output (images of text or images with textual elements), still has caused questions regarding how to approach it. While a lot of poetry on Instagram is simply images of poetry remediated on the social media, there also exist a type of platform literature, or platform poetry, which in this paper is treated as instapoetry proper.

With instapoetry proper the intent of publishing it on Instagram is something that affects how we should approach it aesthetically. From a media ecological and posthumanist perspective; while we use social media to do things, it also affects how we do things.

In this paper I will present and argue for my proposed definition of instapoetry proper, which is poetry created with the intention of being an Instagram post published in Instagram. This definition is meant to work as a way to combat textual as well as media blindness when approaching an instapoem for the close reading of it. I will show that the creation of instapoetry is closely tied with the creation of Instagram posts and the use of social media in general, which among other things includes the editing and filtering of the everyday to become extraordinary. With instapoetry, this means creating a literary experience of an Instagram post where you approach the poem first by looking at it.

I will show this by close reading different examples of instapoetry from both an established instapoet, the Norwegian instapoet Alexander Fallo, and from someone in the gray area between hobby writer/amateur/Instagram user and established instapoet.

This paper will touch upon how the digital environment, or rather, the digital ecologies of which instapoetry exist in, offer a different type of literary experience when the poem is intended as an instagram. While perhaps not being born digital poetry, it is never the less born into the digital. This is relevant because it shows how the situatedness of the authors and the poetry requires adjusted close readings of this type of poetry, where the poetic work – understood in encompassing more than just the (digitally) printed word depicted in the image – needs to be read as what it is intended to be.

Even if the remediations of instapoetry into printed works might lure us into thinking we can continue with our old ways of close reading poetry. Which in some cases might be too tied to the print ecologies of our contemporary world and thus cause unintended textual and media blindness to new non-avant garde works, such as the pop poetry of instapoetry.