This has been a year of trying new things, perhaps out of necessity. As daily life contorts further into this bazar and isolating realty of rational agoraphobia, maybe it was only natural to explore new hobbies and develop new habits. On top of self-publishing a book and launching a YouTube series, I’ve been making an effort to improve my social media presence. After couple of months of redoubled efforts, I can confidently say that, um, well, I have no idea if it’s working. On Twitter, my strategies are relatively simple: increased interactions and don’t be self conscious about tweeting the same link multiple times in too short a period (because chances are that no one saw it the first time anyway.) My Instagram approach, however, is a lot more experimental. I want to know what works. I want to find out what gets people’s attention. And I want to use proven popular strategies without adopting an inauthentic aesthetic and sacrificing my own. I’m talking about visual poetry, or Instagram poetry, or graphic poetry. Have we landed on a preferred name and I missed it? In any case, the overlap between popular posts and my authentic style is a something I’ve yet to discover. I’ve shared “political” poetry about human rights issues that eat at me:
And I’ve written this little romantic poem:
For the sake of the USPS and fantasizing about the future, I wrote and illustrated the following post, and I intend to illustrate more in the future.
None of the following posts took off with many likes, and I don’t really have a reason for that yet. I’m not sure if I mind entirely, because when I want to return to human rights poetry, there’s no fear that I need to hide my opinions.
Meanwhile, back on Twitter, I’m returning to the vss35 hashtag, and I decided to cross one of my #vss tweets with spooky season:
All this is to say that I’m still exploring. I still don’t get it. I’m still figuring out how I want to post and what my Instagram aesthetic is. I’ve never been hugely active on social media, but I know that it’s necessary in today’s market. If I want to sell a second book, if I want to market my passions, cracking this code is a necessity, but I can’t help experimenting. I like to play. Between the promotional posts, the YouTube series, and these Instagram poems, I’m having fun and working hard. Thank you for letting me share some of what I’m trying.
The Favoring Wind 