Axon: Creative Explorations

This article explores the emergent format of ‘parallel posts’ or ‘web weaving’, a practice of literary collage on blogging website Tumblr, and argues that they represent a new wave of poetry reception, unbound to formal literary education or to conventional spheres of cultural capital. Following Audre Lorde’s ‘Poetry is not a luxury’, I discuss parallel posts as a vital component of the broader digital literary sphere, a counterpoint to Instapoetry, and as a resurgence of commonplace book-keeping. I analyse the prevalence of users positioning poetry on Tumblr as akin to or superior to school-bound English education, and parallel posts as a humanist practice. I conclude by arguing that parallel posts represent a reclamation of poetry as a common resource and an ideology.