Social Media
A billion performed selves, and the one poem that tells the truth about yours.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about social media: imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, exercises and prompts, in this free theme guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
Social media hands poetry its oldest subject in new packaging: the gap between the self we perform and the self we are. Every feed is a curated anthology of one life, edited for envy or approval, and the poem's job is to stand in the gap, at eleven at night, between the glowing highlight reel and the person scrolling it alone. Loneliness in a crowd, the hunger to be seen, the arithmetic of likes: these are lyric subjects, and they were lyric subjects long before they had an interface.
The theme also includes real tenderness. Friendships genuinely live in group chats; the dead leave accounts behind like lit windows; a grandmother learns to comment with too many emojis. A poet who brings only contempt to this material will miss most of what is actually there.
Why poets return to it
Poets write about social media because that is where a vast share of human feeling now happens, and poetry follows feeling wherever it goes. There is also a formal fascination: the platforms impose compressions and rhythms, character limits, captions, endless scroll, that shape how people speak, and poets from Patricia Lockwood onward have folded that idiom into serious work. Meanwhile the instapoetry boom proved that verse can find millions of readers on a phone screen, and started a craft argument the poetry world is still having.
Where it comes from
The theme's ancestors are older than the platforms. Poets have always studied performed selves: the court poets flattering patrons, the sonneteers curating their suffering for circulation, Emily Dickinson archly asking how dreary it is to be somebody, public like a frog. Social media simply industrialised an audience the lyric always suspected was watching.
The native generation arrived quickly. Lockwood's poems and prose made internet language a literary instrument; performance poets found their clips travelling further than their books; and Rupi Kaur's Instagram verse, whatever one thinks of it line by line, changed publishing's mathematics. The strongest recent poems in the theme treat the feed neither as apocalypse nor as home, but as weather: pervasive, shaping, worth describing exactly.
The elements that carry it
- The scroll itself, endless, thumb-driven, half-conscious, gives you a gesture the whole culture recognises.
- Metrics as imagery: likes, follower counts, the small red heart, numbers standing where feelings should be.
- Blue light on a face in a dark room is the theme's defining picture, intimacy and isolation in one image.
- The abandoned or memorial account, a dead friend's profile still suggesting birthdays, carries the theme's grief.
- Notification sounds and their silence: the ping that lifts the pulse, the quiet that follows a post that nobody liked.
Techniques that work
- Write the gap: put the posted image and the unposted reality in adjacent lines and let the reader feel the distance.
- Borrow the platform's forms deliberately, a poem in captions, a thread, a comment section, so structure enacts subject.
- Resist the sermon; dramatise one scroll, one post, one 2 a.m. comparison instead of denouncing the whole internet.
- Use metrics against themselves: let a number carry emotion precisely because it cannot, the four likes on the news of a divorce.
- Keep one foot in the body, the thumb's ache, the neck's curve, the blue-lit face, so the digital stays physically real.
Mistakes to avoid
- Pure condemnation. “We stare at screens while life passes” is an editorial, not a poem; complicity is more interesting than contempt.
- Datedness by trademark: platform names and features age fast. Gestures, scroll, post, block, unfollow, outlive brands.
- Forgetting the tenderness: group chats, memorial pages and long-distance families are part of the truth.
- Abstraction. A poem about “society” fails where a poem about one person drafting and deleting the same reply succeeds.
An exercise
Take one real post you almost made but deleted. Write a poem in two columns or two stanzas: the polished post, and everything that was true instead. End on the moment of choosing.
A challenge
For one week, write a four-line poem each evening about a single moment of that day's scrolling: one image seen, one feeling registered, no commentary. On day seven, arrange the best pieces into a sequence.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about someone deciding what to do with the account of a person who has died, and what they read there before deciding.
Before you submit
- One concrete scene, one scroller, one moment, carries the theme.
- The poem includes complicity, not just critique.
- The body appears: eyes, thumb, posture, light on skin.
- Brand names are absent or chosen deliberately, with the ageing risk accepted.
- Some genuine warmth or connection is allowed to be real.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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