Every few months a screenshot goes around. Somebody takes a grocery list, breaks it into six lines, adds a small pen drawing of a bird, and captions it with a joke about how they are now a bestselling poet. The joke always lands. It lands because we all agree, without saying so, that the poetry on our phones is not real poetry.
I want to argue the opposite. Not that every viral poem is good, because plenty of them are not. But that the specific qualities we mock in Instagram poetry are the exact qualities feminist poets fought for, went broke for, and built entire institutions around. We are laughing at the inheritance while pretending we never knew the family.
The sneer has a paper trail
The clearest version of the contempt showed up in January 2018, when the poet Rebecca Watts published an essay in PN Review called “The Cult of the Noble Amateur.” Her target was the new wave of high-selling women poets, and her closing argument was that the poetry world needed to quit celebrating amateurism. She framed the problem around what she called a cohort of young female poets being praised for honesty and accessibility, words she read as cover for a refusal of craft. She also reached for a comparison to Donald Trump, on the logic that drawing a crowd does not make a thing good.
Read that list of sins again. Honesty. Accessibility. Popularity. A large audience of women. Self-made distribution. Now go back fifty years and look at what feminist poets in this country were deliberately building.
The presses were homemade, and that was the point
In 1969, a poet publishing under the single name Alta started Shameless Hussy Press out of her house in the Bay Area. It was the first feminist, woman-owned press in the United States, it specialized in poetry, and it put out the first edition of Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,” along with early work by Pat Parker and Susan Griffin. She printed the books herself on a small offset press at home. Her first anthology existed because she went looking for poems about being a woman, found roughly ten, and used every one of them.
The same year, Judy Grahn and Wendy Cadden founded the Women’s Press Collective in Oakland. It started in their living room with a mimeograph machine bought cheap from Diane di Prima and printing skills picked up secondhand. Nobody trained them. They took the equipment apart to learn how it worked.
That is the origin story of feminist poetry in America as an actual movement, and it is not a story about gatekeepers, MFA workshops, or peer review. It is a story about women who could not get published deciding that the barrier was the distribution channel, not their talent, and then going around it. Grahn described the sequence plainly in a later interview: build the press first and the readership follows, never the other way around.
Instagram is a mimeograph with better reach. A woman with no agent, no MFA, and no connections reaches a hundred thousand readers from her bedroom. If you admire Alta’s AB Dick 360 and sneer at a phone screen, you are not defending craft. You are defending a particular era’s technology and mistaking it for a standard.
Accessibility was a political position, not a shortcut
Feminist poets argued for plain speech on purpose. Grahn’s “Common Woman” poems were written to be copied and passed hand to hand. Audre Lorde made the case directly in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” describing poetry as the form women could actually afford, in time and in money, and as the place where feeling becomes thought before it becomes action. Nikki Giovanni put her poems on records with gospel choirs behind them and sold them to people who would never have walked into a poetry reading.
By 1982, the critic and poet Jan Clausen looked at the decade behind her and concluded that poets had become some of feminism’s most influential activists and theorists. Clausen also described the scene that produced them as a largely lesbian underground of insurgent small press poets. These were not people optimizing for a review in a quarterly. They were writing to be understood by women who needed to hear something specific, quickly, in language that did not require a decoder. Short lines, direct address, the first person, the assumption that a woman’s private life is legitimate public material. Every one of those choices was made deliberately in the 1970s and is now treated as evidence of laziness in 2026.
Where the critics are not wrong
I am not interested in pretending the criticism is pure gatekeeping. Some of it is accurate.
The feed rewards the poem you can absorb in two seconds while standing in line. That pressure flattens things. A line that would have been the seed of a poem gets posted as the poem. Aphorism is not the same as verse, and a lot of what circulates is a decent aphorism wearing line breaks as a costume. Repetition of a successful formula is rewarded until the formula is all that is left, and an author who is also a brand has a financial reason not to change.
Worth noting: the feminist presses argued about exactly this. There were long, ugly fights in the 1970s about whether political usefulness excused weak writing, and whether a poem that served the movement owed anything to the ear. That argument is native to this tradition. It is not an argument between the tradition and some invader.
Notice who gets called an amateur
The pattern is old and dull. When women’s writing sells, the objection arrives dressed as a concern about standards. It happened to the confessional poets, who were told their material was too domestic and too hysterical. It happened to the small press women, who were told they printed each other because nobody else would. It is happening now to poets whose readers are mostly young and mostly female.
Watts’s essay was reviewed in the press as excoriating and as a stinging critique. She had in fact declined to review Hollie McNish’s collection at all, writing the polemic instead, on the grounds that reviewing it in a poetry journal would imply it counted as poetry. That is not a judgment about a book. That is a ruling about who is allowed in the room. Wikipedia
What to do with any of this
Read backward from the feed. If a four-line poem about your mother’s hands moved you at seven in the morning, go find Lucille Clifton, who did that in six lines and made it hold forty years. Go find Pat Parker, first published by a woman with a press in her house. Go find Mitsuye Yamada’s “Camp Notes,” written out of the internment camps and published by that same press.
The best possible outcome of Instagram poetry is not that it replaces the canon. It is that it functions the way Alta’s anthology did, as a door that a reader walks through and then keeps walking. Poems written for women, sold to women, mocked by everyone else, and quietly changing what the next generation thinks it is allowed to write down. That is the whole history. The platform changed. The argument did not.
Author bio to run at the foot of the piece:
Holly Parsons is a poet, journalist, and California poetry speaker whose work is often performed with live musicians, from San Diego and Los Angeles to Dublin. She is the author of The Soul of a Woman book series, a collection of poetry on love, life, and the uncensored interior life of women. Read more of her writing on feminist poetry at hollyparsons.us.
That comes to roughly 1,200 words, no em dashes, both keywords placed once each in the bio where they read naturally rather than stuffed into the body.
Two things to check before you pitch it. Your book is listed as Soul of a Woman: A Poetic Journey in Love and Life, so if the exact phrase “The Soul of a Woman book” matters for search, you may want to confirm that is how you want it styled. And note that Isabel Allende has a 2021 memoir with the identical title, which will compete with you on that keyword.
