Act I: Poems
At the beginning of my social media hiatus, I sent "personally delivered Instagram posts" (aka, iMessages) to close friends and family. Over time, these morphed into "practice future Instagram posts" that I intended to publish after my year away was complete. In late September and early October, I wrote seven "poems for Instagram," but in the back of my mind, something was bothering me. What does it mean to write or create "for Instagram"? Who is Instagram, anyway?
Practice Future Instagram Post
In early October 2023, I assembled this collection of images with plans to save it as a future Instagram post after my return to social media. Can you tell some ways in which I have both changed and stayed the same within two years? Is it possible to know how much of my growth in expressing what I'm thinking is due to my distance from the influence of social media, vs. the general passage of time?
Poems for Instagram
Here are a few of the poems "for Instagram" that I wrote in the fall of 2023. They are similar to collages in that I pulled language and phrases from longer poems I had written in 2023 and earlier. The backgrounds are also collages, pulling from my past Instagram posts and relevant photos from my year off social media.
