In the digital space I occupied, my words were given a peculiar weight that I had never experienced before; they were read and remembered.
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from an undergraduate student in Germany. She was beginning to write her thesis and was wondering if I was the Emily Palermo who had written a poem she had stumbled upon online. Every couple of months a similar inquiry will make its way into a different inbox. My university email was a new one, but definitely not the most bizarre (that honor belongs to a man who found me on LinkedIn).
Such inquisitions refer to a collection of poems that I posted to Tumblr from 2013 to 2018, starting when I was in high school and continuing through college. In those five years, I shared over 300 poems and several digital chapbooks online and was met with the occasional virality, as certain poems garnered hundreds of thousands of notes, and the blog itself generated tens of thousands of followers. I have a picture a stranger sent me of their ribs, proudly displaying a tattoo of a line I wrote when I was sixteen.
I never had greater aspirations for these poems beyond the shared digital space that Tumblr provided, and once I started graduate school, I deleted the blog out of an anxiety of someone “important” finding it. However, as the years since have proven, the internet is nothing if not forever. And if I can’t escape them, it at least seems worth it to dwell on them.
On Tumblr, the form of a poem could be made fluid and mobile, with the proximity and interactions between author and audience, between the text and its readers becoming an integral part of the poetry itself. Poems could easily grow or shrink in the hands of their readers, embellished by textual additions as well as amputated by an overly enthusiastic editor. What could often survive this kind of active circulation was not the entire poem itself, but rather a random line or two that resonated with a certain reader.
On the occasion that I run into writing of mine in the wild, it is almost always the same excerpt—four lines of a poem that I wrote in college. Stripped of context, these lines exist in different internet spaces purely as a quotation, even as the full poem can still be found on the online zine where it was originally published. Often, this excerpt is included in different kinds of collages, collected with similarly-excerpted quotations that are tied together by similar themes. In such mosaics, the poem becomes a part of a freshly-formed text, constituting new meanings and relations.
Beyond their separation from the body of the poem itself, I often stumble across these poems with a similar kind of detachment. It has been nearly seven years since I deleted the blog and over a decade since I started posting at all. With so much time passed, it makes sense to me that everything has changed: the author, the internet, even the poems themselves. Perhaps because of this gap of time, I find it tempting to write the whole thing off—to erase any meaningful connection to these poems even as they are still intimately tied to my name. I am resisting the version of this essay where I denigrate the things that I wrote as a teenager as “bad” poetry, thinking about them in the ways that we recall our diary entries from middle school or those shitty novels we secretly love. And that may be the easier essay to write—one that’s full of self-deprecation and pokes fun at trite metaphors and expected motifs—but I am uninterested in shame. And, having now been forced to reflect on that five-year span, I actually find there are far more interesting things to consider beyond disavowal.
The kind of poems I wrote on Tumblr shelter under a larger umbrella of “internet poetry,” which is a fairly amorphous term that, like most things involving the internet, confuses more than it clarifies. In an effort to avoid a more laborious taxonomizing—which in writing this, I have come to realize might be necessary, although far beyond the scope and space that I have allotted myself —I simply offer an understanding of internet poetry as that which has been shaped in either content, form, or audience by the internet.
Because of the explosion of social media in the 2010s, tracing genealogies of internet poets and poetic forms can be tangled and confusing. Much of the critical attention given to internet poetry focuses largely on the subgenre of “Instapoetry,” a particular style of online poem that has been largely (and controversially) popularized by Rupi Kaur, who has been named “Instagram’s Favorite Poet.” Even if you do not know Rupi Kaur by name, you will know the style of this kind of Instapoetry—poems made to fit an Instagram carousel, a sentence divided by line breaks as stanzas shrink to a lowercase, serifed word or two. A bite-sized poem made for easy consumption and inevitable parody. As the poet who launched a thousand think pieces, Kaur and her poems have become a kind of shorthand for this relationship between social media and poetry. And yet, in the over-emphasis on Instagram as the center of this problematized relationship, Tumblr’s own originary status can largely go unobserved. Even Kaur, whose work has become synonymous with Instagram, began by posting her poems on Tumblr before making the switch.
Of course, this focus on Instagram logically makes sense. The more mainstream of the two social media sites, Instagram’s emphasis on visibility and the accumulation of followers is a far-cry from Tumblr’s more alternative legacy. As editors Alison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch suggest in their 2020 collection, a tumblr book: platform and cultures, Tumblr can be understood as an “alternate world,” a digital space where “disparate people come together over mutual passions and desires in a queer, carnival-like atmosphere that distinctly dispenses with normalcy.” While success and virality can be found in such a world, the very nature of Tumblr suggests that mainstream popularity may be more of a bug than a feature.
For those who did not come of age within the infinite scroll of the Tumblr dashboard, the site stood out among the typical social media experiences offered by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, particularly in the 2010s. While these other feeds were typically populated by people you knew and the occasional celebrity whose page you followed, the Tumblr dash consisted almost entirely of strangers, blogs that you discovered through these “mutual passions and desires,” or less intensely-put, your different fandoms or interests. As such, Tumblr offered a comforting cloak of anonymity; it operated separately from the constraints of your non-digital life.
For me, that meant an opportunity to share writing and poetry away from the eyes of the people whom I interacted with daily. Instead of the succinct nature of the Instapoem, these poems were mostly written in blank verse, reflecting the longer, more experimental forms and play with language that were popular on Tumblr at the time, like poems from Richard Siken’s collection Crush and other online poets like Clementine von Radics circulated. Even as I started adding my name to my poems to ensure credit, it still felt more like a persona than anything. The digital poet whose work circulated across Tumblr could be a separate Emily Palermo from the one who was making her way through a Louisiana public high school and university, despite these poems’ fairly confessional nature, where I sought to make legible the different experiences and feelings that defined my late teens and early twenties.
Beyond this anonymity, Tumblr’s unique features also offered a specific kind of audience experience. Tumblr’s fundamental mode of sharing was its reblogging system, meaning that your posts could end up on someone else’s blog, subject to any additions or specific tags that individuals used to organize their own blogs. Similar to the reach of the retweet, a single post could easily escape the boundaries of your own small following and spread. However, unlike retweets, when I followed the trail of notes that accompanied a poem’s circulation, what was always interesting were these paratextual moments—the way that Tumblr users’ ability to tag and add to a post offered new layers of individual or collective meaning. Often this came in the form of tags that emphasized certain lines or made cross-media connections, associating a poem with a certain show or ship. Occasionally, this feature of audience engagement could trend toward the problematic, as users could edit and erase the text itself, confounding issues of authorship and attribution.
Internet poetry and its ilk raise an infinite amount of concerns á la Anna Kornbluh about the ways that this circulation of language and literature is endemic to our current era of “too late capitalism.” We can draw connections between the popularization of forms of poetry that lend themselves more to memes and the declining quality of the literature we popularize and consume. This internet-spawned canon reflects our rapidly-shrinking attention spans and desires for linguistic simplicity, reflecting larger concerns about literacy and comprehension. The internet has also shaped, for better or worse, our own subjectivities—the different kinds of selves that we cultivate in our different digital spaces, the different traces that we, whether wittingly or unwittingly, leave in our wakes.
However, despite these concerns, I nevertheless look back at my time as a minor Tumblr poet as an almost-utopian engagement with language, as I found this pleasure in not just writing, but in having an audience engage with my work. In the digital space I occupied, my words were given a peculiar weight that I had never experienced before; they were read and remembered. Three years after sending me a picture of her tattoo, that same stranger messaged me to tell me that the words on her ribs had brought her some small measure of comfort as she went through a major break-up. When I announced my engagement last fall, a friend from my Tumblr days cited a line that I had written when I was nineteen in her congratulations. Even as these poems are warped as they pass through and beyond the internet, they still remain in some shape or form, constellated across the minds (and bodies) of those who read them.
Outside of the random lines that occasionally find their way into my journal, I don’t write poetry anymore. Yet, I still feel the traces of it in my academic work, even now in my final semester of graduate school as I put the final touches on my dissertation. In many ways, my work as a reader and a writer has been fundamentally shaped by the years I spent sharing poems online. It was in this play and experimentation with words and their forms that I discovered the most about close reading, as I saw the infinite ways that meaning could be made and remade, construed and misconstrued. These skills are now such a central part of my teaching and scholarship.
I have erased the original archive; yet there are some things I can’t bring myself to delete or scrub from the internet. I don’t know if I could explain exactly why. Pride, perhaps, even though a lot of the poems that remain are definitively mediocre. Futility, of course, as much of my writing has taken on a life of its own, and even if I wanted to, I can’t fully eradicate the connections between myself and the clumsy things I wrote at seventeen. Irony because the poems that I wrote during this five-year period are going to have a far greater readership than anything that I have written in graduate school.
Or maybe these poems are just a kind of relic that I am loath to let go of, that I am looking back at with rose-tinted glasses. They are a reminder of not only my evolving relationship with writing, but also of our own changed world and the ways that language, writing, and the internet intersect. Now, our feeds flood with AI content and targeted misinformation, social media CEOs act as gleeful participants in the rise of global fascism and the repression of marginalized voices, and the prevalence of anonymity and bots has led to a surge of unmitigated cruelty in the relationship between creators and their audience. I am thinking back to an internet experience that I am not certain could exist now—remembering the digital spaces and communities that we could create for ourselves, the global connections that we could cultivate, and the collective experiences with language that we shared.
Emily Palermo is a defunct poet who has finally given up on metaphors about monstrosity and the moon. She holds a PhD from Tufts University, and her work looks at the triangulation of affect, geography, and history in twentieth and twenty-first century southern literature. She is currently trying to imagine a world beyond academic validation.