If you just want a copy of the chapbook, I gotchu. You can download it directly right here, but if it piques your interest, please dive into the article and read our story.

As with most Pen Clique productions, it started out with a frustration…

As we’ve reviewed so many Instagram poems on our podcast, one swipe through the #poetry search results yields a ton of meh-tier “poems.” But here and there, we’ve struck gold; super creative, brief and well thought-out poems that made a great use of the IG platform. However, no matter how much we loved those top tier pieces, their likes and comments are overshadowed when compared to more popular types of content on IG like memes, thirst traps, funny videos, visual art, etc…

As fans of poetry, we asked ourselves, “What does it take to make a scroll-stopping, eye-grabbing, double-tap worthy poem?”

The Thesis: Dope Poetry With Dope Visuals Will Make For a Dope Experience

The Poetry Art Gallery was the experiment which gave us the opportunity to test out ideas we’ve been kicking around for years. Making a bunch of dope poetry art, however, wasn’t the only goal we had in mind; we had another idea with a more practical application. With poetry text, you can make chapbooks and simple prints like coasters and postcards. However, the plain “text on a flat background” aesthetic will only attract people that are ok with the “text on a flat background” look. But if one was to craft a poem that’s as aesthetically pleasing as it is to read, one might reach a far wider and more accessible audience.

Poetry Art For The People (And Poetry Art Merch For The Poets)

If you’re gonna hang art on the wall, buy a shirt with a printed design on it, or keep a book out on your coffee table, they all need to have at least one thing in common: they all gotta be beautiful, interesting, or captivating enough to be worthy of taking up your wall space, to be worn on your body, and to be shared with loved ones. The Poetry Art Gallery was an experiment that had two outputs to keep an eye on: how would a public audience react to the poetry art, and what does poetry merchandise look like within this movement? We wanted to not only help widen the poetry audience, but to also create poetry art merch that would cater to this new audience. Using the designs from the poetry art pieces, one could potentially print dozens of types of merch through a print service like Printify or Red Bubble. Shirts, jackets, mugs, posters, fabric tapestries, stickers, you name it. The visual poem media allows for a much wider diversification of merch options over plain text.

Exhibit A: Poetry Art Prints & Shirts

Click Here

For this reason, we gave each poet that contributed to the art gallery the high-res poster print files of their poem, a couple dozen prints in various sizes and a chapbook – all for them to both sell and hopefully use to create their own merch. It was awesome to give to our poetry community some exciting new merch that was once just an idea we tossed around. It felt great to see the poets’ faces light up when we revealed their posters to them.

For the designers however, I feel like I’m just eternally in their favor (or in terms of work trade, I owe you a comp). But ultimately, I knew that the poet-designer relationship is an unfair work-trade…

A new form of art movement requires a new form of artist. As we’ve seen from the Instagram poets, micropoetry is their form of choice. Poets that slam mostly tend to favor freeform. Poetry art will require poets that have a flair for the visual arts. For all we know, there could be tons of kids that have a knack for both words and illustration and never knew the two art forms could combine into poetry art. The Poetry Art Gallery was meant to inspire poets into seeing there’s more that could be done with poetry both as a media form and as merch; we also opened the gallery to the public and the reception was great, proving that the enticement of a cool poster from afar will spark appreciation for the poem within. Lastly, we wanted to see for ourselves if the poetry art form would be a sustainable form of poetry. We’re still figuring out that last part as we’ve since tried doing a few tutorials and, while our IG poetry community got the message loud and clear, we’re really hoping that somewhere out in the world there’s a couple curious kids that both draw and write who go to YouTube looking for answers as to what to do with their passions for pixels and prose…

Thank you to all the Clique that donated, supported, and worked with us on this endeavor. To show our appreciation, our Poetry Art Chapbook is now free to download here:

Not as dope as the physical copy, but at least you get to own a piece of the vision we’ve set forth. BIG thank you to all the poets & artists that participated:

Poets:

Artists:

There’s a ton more of documented footage and personal stories to be told from this experience, but honestly, the experiment is far from over. We’re still figuring out what will truly make poetry shine in the modern era, but poetry art is still at the core of our presentation. We’re just trying to be the change we’ve always wanted to see in the poetry community, and if you share our vision, then you already down with the clique. Link up with us on Instagram or talk directly to us and share your work on our Discord, and we’ll see you online.

~Kuya David