Time, after all, matters in this process of therapeutic discovery. Poetic discovery is a process that is sustained over a period of time, whether this involves a reading time of three minutes or three hours. The lack of time it takes to read an Instagram poem is a function of the genre, as Faith Hill and Karen Yuan note: ‘The limited confines of an Instagram post incentives the bite-size lyric, the tidy aphorism, the briefly deliverable quote.’ The irony, then, is that if a reader turns to Instapoetry out of a desire for a kind of self-care, they may miss out on the modes of self-repair only made available through difficulty and the time it forces us to take. If a reader experiences feelings of unease and anxiety in the face of a difficult poem, they must, by definition, sit with them, and eventually read and think in spite of these feelings (or with them and through them). The reader is forced to move from a position of overwhelming bewilderment to one where they are trying to find a way in: to shift from despair mode to interpretative mode, or indeed, find interpretative mode within despair mode. Further, the quality of attention and focus involved in attempting to interpret something that is initially inscrutable can close out other thoughts and is in some ways like meditation as it involves focus and a kind of emptiness, a clearing of distractions from the mind so that perceptions can be made and noticing can happen. The immediacy of the Instapoem, both in a cognitive and temporal sense, discourages this.

The therapeutic potential of Instapoetry is further complicated by its relationship to emotion, and particularly, to the category of sentimentality. Instapoetry is often both associated with (by its critics) but differentiated from (by its practitioners) a ‘hallmark’ mode of sentimentality. Many Instagram poems offer an outpouring of emotion but associate it with a specific (glammed-up and homogenised) mode of self-presentation. ‘Hallmark’ is shorthand for mawkish sloganeering, but it also opens out onto something bigger – Hallmark is, specifically, uncool sentimentality. It is pale pink and lavender, infantilised drawings of teddy bears on cards, the raised gilt of romance novel covers, comic sans, bath beads and quilted satin. There is a niche bigotry in implicitly defining Instagram’s sentimentality against this, in the Instapoem’s flaunting of a mawkishness that is confident in the knowledge that its big feelings are licensed by ardour and beauty. This sign-off from Atticus suggests that to be poetic is to be sentimental in the sense of having something like ‘Before Sunset’ on a mental loop: ‘… keep that poetic spirit alive, and I wish you a lifetime more of skinny dips, sunrises and road trips. And, I hope we cross paths one day, hopefully with lots of wine and under a summer moon.’ These big emotions are acceptable, it would seem, when they involve a life lived in black and white, not pastel, in imagined proximity to the Eiffel tower and somehow also the Manhattan skyline. Hallmark is in the suburbs and away. This sentimentality is OK, in other words, because everyone here is hot.

Why does all this matter? It matters because even if feelings are receiving ersatz treatment in the bulk of Instapoems, the feelings and the needs being brought to bear on these poems are themselves real, complex and urgent. There are some Instapoets who are producing work which does much more than sloganeer or accessorise a lifestyle, but the structure of the critical conversation around Instapoetry makes them hard to distinguish and write about. As Bucknell observes, ‘technical analysis can be butted away too easily as gatekeeping.’ The fusing of self and product in Instapoetry means that critics are reluctant to evaluate the aesthetic objects for fear of policing the people who make and read them. This precludes nuanced critical conversations about, say, the merits of early vs. late Rupi Kaur, the role of humour in Hera Lindsay Bird, or what happens formally when a poet known for Instagram publishes on paper.

It also stops us having confronting and necessary conversations about the emotional texture of these aspirational lifestyle images: while it is of course predictable and cheesy to offset words with a typewriter and a latte, is there something in this catalogue-browsing emotion worth parsing as its own phenomenon? What is the relationship between the affect involved in the material aspirations of ‘lifestyle’ imagery and the desire for sustenance and self-repair that brings readers to Instapoetry in the first place? Like all kinds of self-care under late capitalist precarity, Instapoetry’s anaesthetic simplicity is both a response to and a symptom of complex structural problems: problems that are as societal as the lyric voice is individual. As Soraya Roberts writes, ‘this place has thus become a haven for the young, pummelled not only by the digital world but the world itself. … In other words, this is the poetry of capitalism.’ You can’t skincare your way out of burnout, as Anne Helen Petersen notes. Similarly, you can’t scroll your way out of structural oppression. The fact that people are trying, though, is a phenomenon that deserves respect and attention – the irony is that one form of this respect would be the evaluative engagement that the form’s fusion of words and writer seems to preclude.