Discovering Contemporary Poetry Beyond Social Media

For me, poetry has forever been an elusive passion. Everyone always has a different understanding of poetry, making reading into this often-times-dense form of literature a rather refreshing experience. When I first started trying to learn more about contemporary poetry, social media spaces like Instagram and Facebook seemed like the best place to go. To grow as a poet and to find a community of passionate people putting their work out for everyone to see sounded like a dream.

That did not quite end up happening, however.

Social media, along with its unforgiving algorithm, is not friendly to the growth of literature. This has always been the case, even if amidst all of it, we have seen the growth of bookstagrammers and the like. But these are mainly driven by community engagement, and the contemporary poetry scene, at least in our corner of the internet, does not really get to see much of that.

This is the problem I started to have when I tried to use social media as my sole method of discovering poets both experienced and fresh. The lack of any real community dedicated to poetry caused the growth of my passion to come to an irritating standstill. I had a constant hunger to discover new poets, what style they used, and what they had to say. And though this helped me connect with people from across the world, part of me felt like there was more to be discovered if I looked hard enough.

This led me down a rabbit hole of the many different ways poetry finds expression on the internet. I found a variety of magazines and literary journals, all dedicated to poetry, each of them with their own unique flavour and aesthetic.

Photo: Collected / Brooke Lark / Unsplash

Rust and Moth focused more on contemporary melancholy, whereas Thrush Poetry Journal always valued the eclectic and bizarre. There was also Visual Verse, which stood uniquely as a journal that updated every month with a new picture and only ever posted poems written with that particular photograph as a visual prompt. Fascinating worlds opened before me as I kept exploring, each of these websites felt rich with poems that spoke to me as passionate pieces that will remain on some corner for other surfers of the internet to look at and maybe draw inspiration from.

As for me, I have certainly drawn plenty of inspiration from these works. I have spent hours poring over Poetry Foundation's immense archive of poems which also includes a monthly serializing anthology of poems that has been active for over a hundred years. Any poet interested in exploring how beautifully diverse poetry can be could do worse than spend an afternoon browsing through that website alone.

And there was more, once I opened the gates I allowed myself to be constantly riveted by how the same form of literature was comprehended so differently by different people. The exposure to the diversity in art has opened my world up in ways I could not quite imagine before. I discovered poets who now I consider some of my favorite authors ever, and none of that would not have happened if not for this leap into this unknown world.

For poets, broadening our horizons is a practice that is almost a ritual. While we may work towards eventually building a community, we should also take the time to open ourselves to the hypnotic, sometimes bizarre, and always beautiful work that is to be found in these online spaces.

Raian is currently spending his free time inside his beloved video game. Send him some free time at IG: @raian_is_burning