Why I'm deleting a lot of poetry from my Instagram feed

A shift in approach to sharing my poems on Instagram, plus a bonus poem for my paid subscribers

Image credit: Idle Work Factory

I’ve recently been deleting chunks of content from my Instagram feed. It’s not that I expect anybody to care about this in the grand scheme of things, but as fellow poets, it’s worth discussing with you briefly.

I’m sure you all know that publishing poems via social media is classified as publishing them outright. This means they’ll be ineligible for almost all literary mags/journals and prizes/competitions. Excerpts are OK, but full poems are not.

So, there’s one reason not to share your work on social media. Another reason is that you begin to judge the worth of your work based on how much engagement it receives, which is a terrible idea. The algorithms are awful these days, and it can be entirely pot-luck whether one poem receives praise or tumbleweed.

Increasingly, it’s becoming clear that Meta has sold whatever soul it had left to AI and doesn’t give the slightest hoot about your rights as an artist. Any poems uploaded to their platform may well be used to train AI.

Finally, I’ve just been going through my feed from early 2023 onward and have found around a dozen drafts, early ideas, and sketches that I rate. I posted them to Instagram to keep engagement up and then forgot about them entirely. This is also a terrible idea.

Is it any safer to share work on Substack? For the time being, yes. Especially if you disable the ‘AI training tool’ in your Settings (thanks to

Karla Marie Sweet

for the tip).

But aside from any AI or copyright dangers, I’ve found this extremely soothing for my mental well-being. I’m also prioritising putting manuscripts together over attracting likes and shares.

It sounds bleak, but I’m 36 now, and I don’t want to look back on my life as a writer and feel that my output leaned closer towards Instagram than publication. Not that publication is the be-all and end-all. However, my only adult collection was published in 2018, and I’m starting to feel like I want tangible records of my work out there.

So, this is where I’m currently at. Any poems that were already published elsewhere have remained. A few scribbles here and there. But on the whole, anything with potential or worth has been deleted. I’m in awe of poets like Hollie McNish, who produce top-quality ‘sketches’ almost daily. But until I’ve addressed my most vital writing ambitions, the grid can wait.

If I find a publisher for my second collection, I’ll return to posting excerpts and teasers as part of the book’s promotion. But without a book to promote, I’m only damaging myself in various ways.

As always, this is purely my stance. We’re all on different journeys and at varying stages. Below is a bonus poem for my paid subscribers. It was written in my racing green Moleskine in February 2024, and I’m still enjoying it. I hope you do, too!