“My Atoms Have Always Loved Your Atoms.”

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“She’s so good at concealing things. Hiding. Avoiding.”

Skins (2007-2013)

Fandometrics In Depth: Poetry Edition

This April marks the 21st annual National Poetry Month. Launched in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets (@poetsorg), it has become the largest literary celebration in the world. 

On Tumblr, #poetry is the most popular writing tag, with 10% more overall engagements than the next most popular writing tag, #prose. To top that off, #poetry was in the top 5% of all of the tags used on Tumblr in 2016.

From classic #haiku to transformative #visual poetry, #all caps poetry images and #spoken word videos, poetry on Tumblr has a variety of formats for you to tell your friend that you’ve eaten the plums out of their icebox.

Where the writers go

Since many people share curated works using the #poetry tag, a few other tags for mostly original work have popped up. The first is #poets on tumblr, which was the fourth largest community tag on Tumblr last year. Writers began using the tag to share their original work in the early 2010s and between 2013 and 2014, overall engagements (searches, original posts, reblogs and likes) grew 1366%. Over the next two years, that growth continued at an average of 214% per year. 

#Spilled Ink started in 2011 after a pair of friends wanted a create a tag for poets on Tumblr to find each other’s work. Since 2013, The tag has averaged 41% year over year growth and has expanded to also include prose and other writing. It’s now one of the largest writing communities on Tumblr. For some sense of scale, in 2016, there were 32% more posts tagged #spilled ink than #poets on tumblr.

Finally, #Excerpt From A Book I’ll Never Write started appearing three years ago for short snippets of poetry—pieces of work shared with no pressure to be complete or finished. In 2014, only a handful of original posts were made with the tag, but were reblogged extensively throughout the year. Between 2014 and 2016, overall engagements in the tag increased 10,407%.

Further reading

No matter what your favorite kind of poetry is, there are dozens of tags to find your next favorite writer on Tumblr. In addition to those mentioned above, there’s also:

#slam poetry, for those who see poetry as a competitive sport

#poetryriot, similar to #spilled ink, this community meets at @poetryriot

#scream poem, to shout your feelings via caps lock

#blackout poetry, creating new poems using book pages and a black marker, and

#micropoetry, think haiku is short? these poems can be as short as a few words.

There are also a number of amazing poetry blogs to follow:

Lang Leav (@langleav), a poet who began sharing her work on Tumblr and is now an international best-seller

Steve Roggenbuck (@livemylief), whose artistic videos and image macro poems break boundaries 

Button Poetry (@buttonpoetry), which focuses on performance poetry, and

Tyler Knott Gregson (@tylerknott) who shares daily haikus on love.

For more blogs, head on over to @staff and check out the roundup.

To the Desert, Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Blue Is The Warmest Color (2013)