2020 An excellent year in reading rates: 34.7% of daily readers
Amanda Gorman Banned the Catalan translator: "They want a female, activist and preferably black translator"
Instagram The literature of 'likes'
That poetry entered the Super Bowl for the first time is no accident.
That the recital of the very young
Amanda Gorman
was as much commented as the performances of
Miley Cyrus
or
The Weeknd
is symptomatic of the poetic boom in the United States.
And it is not for the Nobel Prize to the poet
Louise Glück
,
no.
Poetry has become fashionable thanks to Instagram and a new generation of politically committed poets, activists, feminists, combative and with skin of all colors.
Poetry no longer
is a minority gender: in just five years
doubled its readership
from 6% in 2012 to 11% in 2017 (representing 28 million Americans), according to a macro-study by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Without updated figures to underpin this trend, just look
Rupi Kaur's 4.2 million followers
, a phenomenon of the lyric with more than ten million books sold and of which Seix Barral has just published
everything I need is already in me.
Although Amanda Gorman now monopolizes the media spotlight for her golden minute in the Super Bowl,
his speech at the inauguration of Joe Biden
, the recent cover of Time magazine and her growing 3.6 million followers, the real captain is Kaur.
His figure synthesizes the values (and forms) of a new generation of poets who have made racial diversity and feminism their flag.
Rupi Kaur was born in Panjab (India) and at the age of four he emigrated to Canada, where his father lived as a refugee.
Already in high school he began to post his first poems on Tumblr.
Then came Instagram.
And at 21 he self-published
milk and sugar.
With only three collections of poems, Kaur has already gone around the world and has been translated into more than 40 languages.
Your secret?
He started writing about
seemingly non-poetic themes, such as sexual abuse, violence against women
, depression and anxiety.
His prose is simple and direct, without artifice (a style that most of the
instapoets
).
Your personal stamp
: always write in lower case
and she only uses the period as a punctuation mark, "a visual manifestation and an ode of my identity as a woman of the Punjabi Sikh diaspora," she claims.
Because in the Gurmukhi script no capital letters are used.
«I enjoy this simplicity.
It is symmetrical and simple.
It is a visual representation of what I want to see more of in the world: equality, "he says.
One of the poems that Rumi Kaur shares on her Instagram.
The Kaur phenomenon is worn on the skin.
His verses are usually accompanied by simple drawings and often end up transformed into tattoos.
The same thing happens with the poetry of
rh Sin (or Reuben Holmes
real name), with more than two million followers on Instagram.
With Afro-American roots, rh Sin is a declared feminist poet who stood out in 2015 with the collection of poems
whiskey words & a shovel
(yes, also: just use lowercase and the period).
Although his books have not reached Spain, rh Sin is a
best seller
in the United States and, like Kaur, designs merchandising with his work, especially T-shirts and the now famous cap with the slogan
make poetry great again
in full it was Trump.
TO
RM Drake (Robert Macias)
the
instafame
It came to him in 2015, after his debut,
Beautiful chaos
, and when you star like
Khloe Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Nicki Minaj or Ludacris
they began to share their poems.
At first, Drake used a 1940 typewriter (a Royal) on craft paper and then photographed his verses and uploading them to Instagram.
He already has 2.3 million followers and several books published, the particular
american dream
of this son of Colombian immigrants who settled in Miami.
More than once Drake has confessed that he did not have an easy childhood and that he suffered bullying in high school.
Poetry also has its own Banksy:
calls himself Atticus and never takes off his mask
of
V for Vendetta.
This young Canadian with more than 1.5 million followers is already called the
Mask poet
, which he wears to recitals, performances, and festivals, often with a hoodie.
His anonymity has become a claim, a gesture of rebellion.
Although he covers his face, he has shown pectoral and abdominal more than once with a phrase written on the torso.
Atticus has worn the
merchandising
even further than their
Instacolleagues
;
In addition to clothing, accessories and jewelry, he has created his own wine.
In a collaboration with Californian wineries Winc, he has designed the Lost Poet bottle with poems on the label.
Wine is poetry, write yours
writes Atticus, who has already taken an introductory course to be
sommelier
.
Lost Poet, the Atticus wine in collaboration with Winc.
Even more secretive than Atticus (who's already a rumor about his identity) is
Nayyirah waheed
.
Not a single photo of him: it's the anti-Instagram.
With more than 600,000 followers, she only publishes verses and vindicates the legacy of forgotten African-American poets like Sonia Sanchez.
Poetry in H&M sweatshirts
Brands are not alien to the poetic phenomenon or its commercial vein.
H&M has signed the model and writer
Yrsa Daley-Ward
to design a collection of garments with inspirational phrases that emphasize "love for oneself."
Daley-Ward has only written two books,
Bone
(2014) and
The Terrible
(his memoirs, in 2018, earned him the PEN award), but they have been enough for him to
Beyoncé
will notice her and call her to participate in the script of her film
Black is king
(2020), where he subverted African-American stereotypes.
The daughter of a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Daley-Ward grew up in an industrial town outside Manchester.
At 20, she worked as a model to pay her rent in London.
He went to South Africa in search of better opportunities: "What attracted me is that the models looked like me and there was much more diversity," he says in his memoirs.
Yrsa Daley-Ward in her poetic sweatshirt for H&M.
Gucci also bet on the poet Cleo Wade
in its Chime for change campaign to promote initiatives in favor of girls and women around the world.
Wade defines himself as a poet and activist.
His latest cause: denouncing the growing crimes against the Asian community in the United States (#stopasianhate).
Although there is more: she is a member of the Womens Prison Association, the Lower East Side Girls Club (LESGC) or the National Black Theater, among others.
The daughter of a white mother and a black father, Cleo Wade grew up in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
Since 2018 he has published three collections of poems, none with translation in Spain.
The collection of poems that has reached our country is
Wild embers
(Sleepwalkers) by
Nikkita gill
, a powerful plea for femininity.
With over 610,000 followers, Gill grew up in New Delhi, although she lives in the UK.
From the farthest latitudes he writes
Lang Leav.
Being in New Zealand does not prevent him from exceeding 550,000 followers.
Leav
was born in a refugee camp
while her parents fled the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
They made it to Australia.
And she is already one of the writers from the antipodes with the greatest projection.
And what happens in Spain?
Elvira Tailor
It is the worthy incarnation of the Kaur phenomenon at the national level (she has translated it herself).
But neither the figures nor the phenomenon are comparable.
Still.
According to the 2020 Reading Habits Barometer, 1.3% of readers (this is 64% of the population over 14 years old) indicated that the last book they had read was poetry.
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