At the start of the insta Poetry Day as Dawn cracks open like an egg imagine the timestamp on this program is now 8 am or mid-afternoon as I call it is a 5 am rise or a lot of us look to social media around this time for a caffeine it of a language something to lift so we're going to share some morning fragments that did that for us today so moose What did you find early this morning well this morning I started something because I'm staying in a hotel last night and when I get up this one is a bit tired and I discover that I've accidentally put 2 pairs of pants on. And I mention this on Twitter and all morning I've been receiving messages from people who've had similar kind of accidents I've had quite a few photographs of people with old shoes on who haven't necessarily discovered that until halfway through the day there was a lovely story about somebody who was going to the airport gave the taxi driver a black bin bag full of rubbish and took her suitcase to the recycling area so there's been lots of stories about human frailty which makes us all feel like when we're not alone in our idiocy on Monday it's really early you know if you could you give us something posted early in the morning doesn't have to be a point. Yeah I found a bit of inspiration actually of the American composer Ali helm when I wrote out a simple musical composition and he cut it into strips and then rearrange those notes in lots of different ways and made a time lapse video and asked people which version do you like best and I found that really inspiring because I love the idea of doing that with a poem cutting up the stanzas and rearranging them on slips of paper and seeing which way works best in a sense is going to Instagram is seen as very much a visual medium to student with his filter was well there's a gentler platform Yeah and it does sort of what the haiku does where it forces you to really compress and for me as a user I get these intense shots of creative inspiration these sort of. Appear Finney's of creative inspiration so I love it for that and as we're here in a bit it's where we find a lot of images a very small poems as well as ordinary photos and videos one of the great things about social media I think is that allows us to publish at any moment so Jonathan does it ever matter whether one of your haiku is posted early in the day or if it lands much later in the evening it depends on the poem poems are oftentimes very reactionary and they are usually intended to be funny and sometimes there's an expiration date on what is funny depending on the current events of the day. That is funny in the morning maybe sad by the evening the sun facing ology. Morning always begins with me working over the crack of dawn and Fauci myself to tweet something forcing my empty mind into language this morning I tweeted my own remembered dreams run back to own numbered houses on anonymous streets and when I was younger I always wrote things down as soon as I woke up but on Twitter everybody can see it and respond so it feels like moods that it's a kind of commonplace book for our times wages we just got to store things and put things you know I think it's something about having an audience who are receptive to your thoughts it's the common ground that we find between each other makes it a very enjoyable place to be because otherwise you would just write these thoughts down in a notebook and nobody would ever read them so this week most and I pioneered an early morning language Twitter game called the word service where we served each of the single words to play with so to start with earlier this week I sent most the word grip fruit which is a good breakfast word so most Could your readers what you came up with. It is time for the noble grape fruit to strike out for independence from the grape to take back control to finally have its own name I suggest shot a ball. But what would you call it. Now well I'd bet that most apart from your tweet was that then people started coming up with great ideas that became like a hive mind because you've got 90000 followers not a lot of them will come up with ideas when the yeah I've got some just a random few here we had pink better I squirt squirt squeel tongue tingle sour sphere and sour pout No I think there's confusion sometimes about what the difference is between better and sour I think they're better but maybe they serve as well I don't really want to read. You ever had an aura Blanco grapefruit No no no well this is an interesting thing because we've got some American people on the show so I had a nice tweet from Southwest America saying our great fruit crappy in the U.K. So. That's my only hate out here in the US Southwest are pink grapefruit sublimely sweet joyful mix of tart and sweet It's like eating sunshine. Whereas in the U.K. It's like eating a form of bitterness and. What you do and what we want to do it is that you're Lex Ray a word when you you'll find what's hidden in the hopes and dreams the word might have so is that description work for you the idea of X. Rays Yes but I mean I hadn't thought about that until he said it I feel more that it sort of falls apart in my head and tries to reassemble it in some ways sometimes these things are kind of a byproduct of doing something else or be doing the washing up with something and I don't know if you know the scene at the beginning of the film Gravity where there's lots of fragments of space Taber all sort of whirling round in a 3 dimensional swirl it feels like that's. It's happening but they're trying to sort of re coalesce into something coherent so I do write a lot of puns and bits of wordplay but I try to avoid that with this piece because there is this the pronoun the word play and then it goes beyond that to a kind of I don't know a strange moment I think that pushes back into it with the word because it was standing is in the face all the time really that the grip was being oppressed and yet you illuminated them for years I had somebody saying oh we're going to start calling it great fruit. And then people suggesting this and I looked into the etymology of it and apparently it did start off as great fruit but this is one of those things where people get very annoyed about new words being made up and language changing and all that sort of thing and you know I think whatever's going to be next if we start allowing great fruit so I like that and 2 other words which are 3 other words which suggested one which is Pomerleau which is I think Spanish version of it and the lovely word penpal moose you know French I felt we should have a British word and somebody else suggested the word Shattuck which is an old word for a grapefruit Shaddock which is a lovely word I think that you dish No it's not actually is an eponym So it's from Captain Shaddock it's not from Tintin but he brought the Great Britain as a point I don't know what's of the man who's much been an awful person we should forget him but no you know he's not I'm not using its name it's all in a by word for bitterness then maybe that's not such a bad thing after all 1st came across you with your wordplay up things like that wonderful tweet of yours I built a model of Everest was it to scale No just to look at things like that and then also. It also cartoonist and I think that we lack the language to describe some of these new things you do which are kind of verbal cartoons wordplay isn't enough what you call In Your Head these little parcels of language that you send a do you call them wordplay I think they sometimes end up being jokes but sometimes they just. Delightful because they reveal how wonderful and elastic and full of surprises if you parrot words long enough and hard enough well not even that long you kind of look at them think what is actually mean there they're hidden in plain sight really quite often the idea is hidden in plain sight is exactly you know we're the moment of the hidden in plain sight I think that's what I'm doing really now social media poetry waits for no man a woman so let's refresh the verbs timeline I have moved Susanville timelines already I think time is an illusion say the scientists it is molecular it is bendable a liquid that's years a daily world one of the most popular poets on social media with a global reputation on Instagram she lives in New York but comes from Surely if you miles away from the studio I think can hear what a strong sense of audience she has a new memoir called the terrible and that's a connection honed I think by the daily workshop that is Instagram where you know immediately what people think of a poem like this the stupid thing about it. You run the phone for 4 whole hours while your head hurts and you can't go on and you were HUGE never met while she blames you and you blame her and she hates you and you hate her still in the end it goes like this you I need to touch you I want you her come over right now. I'm she gets loads of emerges in response and I always want to response like that to my posts when I don't get any I think which is broken and I. Have so many things . I ask you sir about the rhythm of her do as a writer morning is really super important to me it is because that's the time that I am kind of fresh out of dreaming so everything's everything is possible and you know you're close to that dream space so you're not you're not limited by the things that you gather up during the day and that's that's when I write that's when I write I don't write after like the middle of the day this is a bad time for social media which because that's the opposite of creativity so like most people who are addicted to their phones I kind of look various points in the day and I scroll up and have a look at what's going on and the thing about Instagram or Twitter is that your immediate response yeah how the fact she was a writer I think is great for testing poems for testing the temperature what what people connect with and like to talk about but too much of it I feel like it will affect me in a negative way because I also you know I don't want to be too affected by by elsewhere feels like your work draft and poetry with a purpose and is designed to lift readers is not internation Well I do is it the intention I'm not sure I like to write about what's really going on for in my interior which I think my interior is no different to anybody else's interior I want them to feel less I. Isolate Nick I want to feel like somebody understands that not alone in whatever's going on because they're not and I know you were brought to power by a grandparents who were slaves they haven't is the Bible was in poor child and I know your granddad learned porch by heart at school in the kind of being so what was it like hearing him resign it kind of thing to the have an impact on you must have done it was might because it's always call in the Bible as well by the way like always so who it is of course it shapes a young mind you start to see things start to become very very used to imagery and and the sing song of the language especially in his accent because it's he has a very Jamaican accent so I identified with that very young age as well and the visual playfulness of poems in your memoir The terrible is really remarkable I think there is a new generation with a real visual sense as with him of poems on the page which I think most of got some to do with Instagram and Twitter and I kind of bravery that I think new person showing with very short pieces but what he thinks the most important way that Instagram was affected the way you write. I think affected the way I write I do think the zine aspect has something to do with it because you want to make something pop out of the page and you don't want to be gimmicky but you also you want somebody to be able to take a breath after receiving something hard something that's gritty maybe a line that they didn't expect all you want to see a line in bold with a space when you want to highlight that line I don't know if I'd really paid as much attention to that before I used Instagram in that way I'd used Instagram initially just to use excerpts of my poetry I never actually wrote for Instagram as research is called the terrible So what is the term was so that's terrible it's quite a tongue in cheek kind of I can of was joking when I when I thought about it I thought I'm going to write a memoir and it's called the terrible but then I thought about what the terrible actually means to me and it's it's just the thing running alongside your life when that if you don't pay attention to you can run amok at the terrible can be so many things grief loneliness this bad addictions. Mental health issues depression so many things and everybody I feel has their own version of the terrible or a mixture of a few and so that's that's what it is. Surely a monk you should. Want to read now is the moment when you realize you could share porch with an audience OK. A girl walks into the bar and you are the girl you in the terrible a drinking alone sitting close to each other holding hands cozying up like old sweethearts The barman says see why the long face when he asks your name you're not sure that the words come out a girl in a bottle says her hair drinks the 2nd whiskey and feels better teetering on the bar the girl says was a list then the barman says a night where people talk they talk they talk he says mostly in poetry he says you like poetry you remember poetry that's something and then if you're seems you remember poetry they say write your thoughts out so you do and you do would you do they say write a poem about this chord in the family if you can next Monday if you can come read it if you can you laugh you say yeah yeah I think I could do that the terrible writes poetry impresses people the terrible writes poetry impresses people and the terrible writes poetry impresses people after all it takes 6 moments to write anything one you dream to you wake up 3 you sit down for you settle on the chair bad floor 5 you think what is happening is this the day when nothing will come is this the end of it 6 then you grip your heart's in voluntarily and your soul comes up your soul comes up I'm telling you no such thing as a block not really your soul arises and you let it go you don't. EXTRACT FROM US His new memoir maybe wonder whether social media puts a more in common with performance boards then with put on the purge because I see Twitter not as a substitute for the purge was a kind of live performance Jonathan do you feel that you feel a free zone as you enter the very exposed area of social media as a poet Yes sure I do its price is probably some kind of dope or mean related response in my brain. Because I am exposing myself to the judgment of the world but also you get a lot of gratification from their potential approval so it's exciting to be on the precipice of of either one of those things and to do see this is a positive thing this kind of exposing of your writing self in a public forum because people often put drafts of things that are still quite own finished it can be incredibly frightening for me personally it's a it's a way of letting go and not being attached to the outcome to show up as myself and then let the world do with that what it will of the idea of showing up as yourself is the great thing about social media showbiz itself let's go back to the important idea of anxiety which was part of what yours was talking about with the idea of the terrible all those things the terrible was was also anxiety and it's at the heart of much writing by appears like the Canadian rupee car and also the put called Nyota Wahid who writes a lot on Instagram This is one of the poems in our own ways we all break it is OK to hold your heart outside your body for days months years at a time he'll. And it's always been important to put it in order to feel it feels good to and the possibility of consolation drives a large proportion of Instagram poetry are we actually to explore these going to work and you quickly establish certain rules do you know what's available to those in his to go and put yes I did that I started to start to teach Instagram poetry workshops because they're such a routine of poets opposing Instagram poetry and old school poets opposing it and I thought rather than get into that discussion I would just make people write it and see if that changed the discussion and so I tried to break down in my mathematical way what the rules are by looking at a 1000 of them and obviously the 1st thing 1st as you say is it's visual but it's also often an image and a text and I think that's you just read the poem wonderfully but I found them very very hard to read and that's why I don't find the performance poetry aspect I think that So in the workshop I'd say this is not for reading out loud I want you to do it in a big piece of paper and then turn it around and show it to the rest of the group and we would comment on how the text was working with the image so I was trying to get that in the text which seemed to me always so straightforward one description one aphorism that's the rule it's not strict but that's what I teach in the workshop as a beginner's Instagram poetry one description tends to be a simile rather than a metaphor one very positive or very a way with you kind of enough of this bad stuff aphorism and one doodle or one image to counter pointed really curious to see or think about the fact that when we see poetry online we often get photographed of a small poem on the page which really kind of is that the size of the celebrates the printed page the photo seems to be as much for the seductive turn of the purge or sometimes the texture of the ink on the paper as for the poem on it Monday do you find that the idea that we're looking at a picture not of something else but actually a picture. Of a poem on a page I wonder if in 10 years or in 20 years if we will continue to see the paper there in that way whether paper will be as much a part of our future as it is a part of our present but for me I like the idea that a person is physically spreading the book that they're reading it makes it feel closer to an in person interaction feels to don't than the fact that on the screen sometimes we're seeing a photograph of a page Yeah although I personally my my my journey Oh gosh. Was actually from screen to page which is fitting I think for someone who writes dystopian haikus. I wrote so many poems on Instagram that a publisher took notice and perhaps pretty and said I'd like to take these Affan stick around and put them into a book and so now I can hold my timeline in my hands. And then photograph the time I thought the person. Thought the monitor Instagram of course yes now I really have always been interested in the canon of plain language brief all too Suze so we find in this world who do you see as the poor to Form of those Our forefathers of this kind of point so I was always a fan of William Carlos Williams And you know so much depends upon the red wheelbarrow glaze with rainwater beside the white chickens where the line breaks lands and one of my very very favorite poems in when I was in New Zealand was from a book called the Cancer Day book by western kind of see about going through cancer and it's just very simple cut it out cut it out and it's the kind of poem that I know in the eighty's and ninety's when I was starting out would have been really frowned on as too simple but then you go to somewhere like New Zealand or parts American that kind of free verse OK so I see Instagram as a sort of return of the repressed free verse for me we commissioned you to make a new poem and I think you've you've generated a new form or another go all the Lightman. How did you make this poem to start with well I approached it statistically to begin with because I thought the challenge because I'm going to perform this is how do you perfo