Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Who reads poetry? Half of the internet, it seems, thanks to the unstoppable popularity of Instapoets such as the Scottish author Donna Ashworth (“Take the love you had for me/ and turn it into laughter”) and the inescapable Rupi Kaur — the Canadian poet’s mini-meditations on love, heartbreak, healing and feminism were the first to spark a social media love for poems in snackable form in about 2015. By the end of 2023, the unlikely combination of Homer, in a new translation of The Iliad by the scholar and translator Emily Wilson, and TikTok stars such as Kaur and the American poet Amanda Gorman, had helped drive poetry sales across the world to an all-time high of £14.4mn, according to BookScan. The poems that GenZ and millennials love can trigger pearl-clutching and snobbery — “Instagram poets are/ behind a rise in revenue/ and platitudes”, The Economist noted recently. But although a younger generation of poetry lovers often share the messiest bits of their lives through verse, using hashtags such as #yourself, #darkpoetry or #positivevibes, they also express solidarity and political engagement — sharing work by Palestinian and Ukrainian poets, for instance, as the starting point for a wider discussion.But Instapoetry — even at its best, even if you’ve nimbly avoided the geysers of gush — is severely limited by its form. Poems and poets float around without context, and the constantly refreshing page favours short pieces over longer texts. The same quotes resurface remorselessly until they lose all meaning, like Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life (“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”), taken from her much longer poem “Sometimes”. If social media poetry turns you into a tourist at the aquarium, anthologies like these bring you back to the ocean itself I love the ability of Instagram and TikTok to introduce you to fresh voices — these platforms introduced me to the work of the American poet and novelist Wendy Chen (Unearthings, 2018; Their Divine Fires, 2024) and Frank Qi from the UK, one of the winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award in 2023 for his poem “Hometown Eulogy”. Too much Insta poetry, though, is like a steady diet of canapés: you miss something you can get your teeth into.Two ambitious new anthologies — Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry, edited by the Indian poet and scholar Arundhathi Subramaniam, and a landmark Latino collection, Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, edited by the American poet, critic and editor Rigoberto González — offer more substantial fare. Each is an invitation to engage deeply and broadly with what for many readers may be unfamiliar poetic traditions.Subramaniam’s Wild Women brings together 56 women poets across centuries of Indian history — some were early Buddhist nuns, some, like the 14th-century Kashmiri poet Lal Ded, were wandering mystics, many were devotees of the Vaishnava and Shaiva Hindu traditions, still others were “Sufi and Vedantin explorers of the sacred”. Her poets, she has said, are a “vast number of largely undocumented, unknown women — wild, wise and wonderful . . . who have been ignored or utterly erased by religious and rationalist narratives.” This fellowship of “vagabonds, lovers, moon gazers” do not hold their tongues, even when speaking of the gods — “Chaining him in my heart’s dark cellar,/ I stripped off his skin with the whip of Om”, writes Lal Ded, translated by the poet Ranjit Hoskote. Some take on taboos that persist through the centuries. “If menstrual blood makes me impure,/ Tell me who was not born of that blood,” demands Soyarabai, a 14th-century Dalit poet. Reading them together makes these women, long-dead but vivid in their sensuous, fierce evocations of devotion, seem like a community of seekers you want to get to know better.González faced an enormous task — bringing together Latino poets across multiple countries and centuries, or what the late Nuyorican poet and playwright Tato Laviera called “a tremendous continental ‘MIXTURAO’” in his 2008 poem “Mixturao”. But through the voices of 180 writers, González presents a vast, clamourous space: “I conceived of Latino poetry as a kind of landscape, a communal, open space where many different visions — Mexican-American, Cuban American, Puerto Rican, Dominican-American, Afro-Latino, and Indigenous Latino, among others — can flourish,” he writes. As the American poet Julia Alvarez writes in her poem “Museo del Hombre”, “How heartening and unsettling to see/ history wearing the face of family./ Not only heroes, poets, Indian queens,/ but tyrants, swindlers, conquistadors/ could be close kin, along with their victims.” If social media poetry turns you into a tourist at the aquarium, spotting one pretty fish after another, anthologies such as these bring you back to the ocean itself. Whole ecosystems open up, networks of influence and affinity waiting to be discovered through slow and patient reading. I find I want both: the quick candy hit of poems in fragmented lines, where you don’t have to engage beyond a like, and the satisfying immersion in the depths of ancient and modern worlds. As the hashtaggers say, #poetrylives. Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
