Instapoetry. I will never, ever miss an opportunity to bash it. Published screenshots of lazy three-line verses, they are everything they sound like. Uninteresting, unoriginal, unstructured and painfully fake-deep — self-serious but ridiculous. A complete affront to literature.
These critical claims, though, would be an understatement from anybody given access to my phone’s Notes app. What lies in the pages of its “writing” folder is arguably several times worse than the work of the average Instapoet. Partially written (and completely melodramatic) sentences and metaphors I jot down at two in the morning convinced they are intellectual blessings, all combine to create embarrassing, free-verse confessions of my deepest emotional experiences.
Writing Notes app poetry has become one of my favorite outlets. It also produces something that I would never let anyone else read; even admitting that it exists prompts the little voice in the back of my head that tells me “you are not a vibe bro.” Within the locked notes nestled between my Friday to-do list and my “movies-to-watch” list lie a history of my relationships, expressions of grief and other flowery-language-ridden thoughts that make me roll my eyes when I read them back. But, this is also what makes these poems so valuable — they’re authentic and unfiltered, not intended for anyone’s eyes except my own. This means they are unburdened by any standards or expectations of quality, unlike any other form of expression.
I struggle with creating anything that I know will be seen. I love writing and making art, but the concept of an audience makes me fixate on small details and filter what I have to say. I even tried formally journaling for a bit, but I didn’t like having a tangible account of my passing thoughts. The idea that my hypothetical future grandchildren might read the entries gave me serious stage fright.
Writing poems in my Notes app feels perfectly impermanent. I ran out of iCloud storage a couple of years ago, so chances are they’ll cease to exist when my iPhone 11 dies. Nobody can read my Notes app confessions, and I’m fairly sure nobody wants to; who cares about the things I write so unceremoniously?
This detachment is what makes writing there so comfortable. While there’s a kind of fulfillment in creating art to share, there’s a special freedom in creating art that’s built to be thrown away. There’s no shortage of artists who discuss the benefits of making bad art — it strengthens you against failures, giving you space and experience to improve. It’s a necessary step in any creative endeavor. But also, it doesn’t only have to be a “step.” Though the practice of writing is inherently productive, what is produced from writing has no obligation to evolve. Your bad poetry can live and die in your Notes app, and that can be all that it amounts to.
I’m involved in multiple forms of creative expression in my daily life (writing, film, fashion, etc.) so I’m constantly conscious of what my work is “trying to do.” Whether it’s a class assignment or a project I’m taking on in my own time, there will always be pressures — internal and external — to give my art a purpose. Allowing myself a space where whatever I create seriously does not matter and has absolutely no point for anyone aside from myself has created the perfect drain to dump my thoughts that don’t make the cut anywhere else. It gives me a place to depart from them, to walk away cleansed and refreshed.
These throwaway thoughts, held to no responsibility to be valuable, occasionally also bloom into writing that I want to share. Without the pressure to create something “good,” I can write more, creating a bank of ideas I can develop later, whether in a short story or an article.
As a college student, it’s easy to decide that the only valuable use of my time is productivity. Deciding to set aside time for something completely unproductive — to create something mediocre that is made to be discarded — has, ironically, held so much value in my life. Allowing myself to create terrible art, toss it away and start again has helped me loosen my perfectionist grip in everything else I do. It’s a reminder that I have imperfect, embarrassing ideas, and they don’t have to be shut out or ignored. They can be a place for reflection, my own private mirror, and sometimes, they might even grow into something more.
Senior Arts Editor Cecilia Dore can be reached at cecedore@umich.edu.
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