Scroll, Like, Recite: How Social Media Became Poetry's Unlikely Stage

In 2023, a twenty-three-year-old from Atlanta posted a forty-five-second video of herself reading an original poem about her grandmother's hands. She filmed it on her phone, in natural light, with no music underneath and no filters applied. Within seventy-two hours, the video had been viewed more than four million times. The comments section filled with readers sharing their own memories of grandmothers, of hands, of the particular grammar of inherited love.

This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern — and it is reshaping what American poetry looks like, who makes it, and who receives it.

The Platform as Publisher

For most of the twentieth century, the pathway into American poetry was narrow and well-guarded. A poet submitted to journals, accumulated rejections, sought the approval of gatekeepers, and — if fortunate — eventually published a collection that reached, in most cases, a few thousand readers. The system produced extraordinary work. It also produced extraordinary exclusion.

Social media has not so much dismantled that system as it has built an entirely parallel one beside it. On TikTok's #BookTok and #PoetryTok communities, poets with no publishing credits and no MFA degrees regularly reach audiences that established literary journals cannot match. Instagram's visual format has given rise to a genre of image-based poetry — short, typographically considered, designed to be screenshotted and reshared — that has produced its own aesthetic conventions and its own stars.

Rupi Kaur, the Canadian-Indian poet whose self-published debut milk and honey became a global phenomenon after circulating on Instagram, is the most frequently cited example of this phenomenon. But she is far from the only one. Poets like Atticus, R.H. Sin, and, more recently, a wave of younger creators who resist easy categorization, have built readerships in the millions through content that prioritizes accessibility, emotional directness, and visual presentation.

Critics within the literary establishment have not always been generous about this development. Some have characterized social media poetry as aesthetically thin — optimized for virality rather than depth. That critique deserves to be taken seriously. It also deserves to be complicated.

Discovery and the Classical Canon

One of the less-anticipated consequences of poetry's social media turn is the renewed interest it has generated in canonical and classical work. Across YouTube, educators and enthusiasts have built substantial followings by offering close readings of poets ranging from Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes to Rumi. On TikTok, users regularly post videos in which they encounter a poem — sometimes centuries old — for the first time and respond to it in real time, their expressions moving through confusion, recognition, and occasionally tears.

This is not the death of the literary tradition. It is, in many cases, its resuscitation.

Dr. Anneliese Park, who teaches contemporary American literature at a university in Philadelphia and has studied digital poetry communities extensively, observes that the algorithm's appetite for engagement has created unexpected pathways into difficult work. "A student who discovers Mary Oliver through a thirty-second TikTok is more likely to seek out her full collections than a student who encounters her name on a syllabus," Dr. Park notes. "The emotional hook comes first. The depth follows."

The Grammar of the Short Form

Video poetry — poems written and performed specifically for short-form platforms — has developed its own aesthetic logic, distinct from both the page and the traditional poetry reading. Pacing is compressed. Imagery must land quickly. The relationship between the spoken word and the visual frame is deliberately considered in ways that print poetry need not be.

This has produced genuine innovation. Poets working in this format are, in effect, creating a hybrid art form that draws on spoken word performance, film, and lyric poetry simultaneously. Some of the most compelling examples blend multilingual elements — a line in Spanish segueing into English, or a stanza delivered in Haitian Creole before its emotional resolution arrives in the dominant language of the platform. These choices are not merely stylistic; they reflect the actual linguistic lives of their creators and their audiences.

For Poezia, which celebrates poetic expression across the full spectrum of human language, these multilingual digital poems represent something significant: a form that is, by its nature, border-crossing.

What Traditional Publishing Is Learning

The literary publishing industry, initially slow to respond to social media's poetic turn, has begun to adapt in ways both substantive and superficial. Major publishers now actively court poets with established online followings, recognizing that a built-in audience of two hundred thousand Instagram followers represents a marketing asset that no publicity budget can easily replicate. Some critics argue this has skewed acquisition decisions toward poets who are skilled self-promoters rather than skilled writers — a concern that is legitimate and ongoing.

At the same time, independent literary journals have begun experimenting with video content, audio editions, and social media serialization as tools for reaching readers who would never encounter a print journal in a bookstore. Organizations like the Poetry Foundation have invested significantly in digital outreach, and their online content regularly achieves engagement figures that would have seemed implausible a decade ago.

The relationship between digital and traditional poetry communities is not simply competitive. It is increasingly symbiotic, even when it is also tense.

The Question of Depth

The most serious challenge posed by social media poetry is not one of quality — great and poor work has always coexisted in every era — but of attention. A poem encountered in a sixty-second video, between a recipe tutorial and a sports highlight, occupies a very different cognitive space than a poem read slowly, alone, on a printed page.

Whether that difference matters depends on what one believes poetry is for. If poetry is primarily a vehicle for emotional recognition — for the shock of feeling seen — then the platform may be sufficient. If poetry is also a practice of sustained attention, of difficulty embraced and slowly yielded to, then something is genuinely at stake in its migration to the feed.

The most honest answer is that poetry has always served both purposes, and the tension between them is not new. What is new is the scale at which that tension is now being negotiated — and the remarkable diversity of voices now participating in the negotiation.

At Poezia, we find that diversity worth celebrating, even as we continue to insist that the poem, in whatever form it travels, deserves our fullest attention.