Using Canva, Instagram, and Sometimes Medium
Publications on Medium that accept poetry are awesome. Some of my favorites include PS I Love You, Publishous, The Creative Cafe, The Junction, Lit Up, Other Doors, Resistance Poetry, Literally Literary, Quartz-Boulevard, and Written Tales. And if you write Haiku, then Haiku Hub and American Haiku are great places as well.
But after a poem has been on Medium for a few days, maybe a week if it is really popular, it will undoubtedly slip into obscurity. With a Herculean effort you can sometimes reboot poems back into brief stardom via Facebook groups, but most poets and writers don’t have the time to do that very often especially if they are writing and publishing a lot on Medium.
Recently I learned about Instagram poets and wrote about it.
After writing about it, a few people asked me how I posted my poems on Instagram.
Short poems tend to work best from what I’ve found. When I first started posting stuff on Instagram I was using a quote generator app on my tablet (Android). I tried several of them, but found them to be really unwieldy especially when it came time to try and format them. Pasting them directly from Medium or even from a Word doc didn’t work very well.
For a while I was flustered and almost gave up. But then I remembered good old Canva. I made a few rough attempts with it and found that poems or stanzas with 3–5 short lines seem to be the easiest to work with. Though if you want to post a larger block of text as a single paragraph, you can play around with the spacing and stretch or shrink the text box.
The choice of fonts in the free version of Canva aren’t great, but it does have Instagram Post as an option when you are creating a new project. Also, you can easily upload your own photos, use free stock ones from Canva, or use a variety of background colors. There aren’t a whole lot of choices other than primary colors when it comes to font colors, but to be honest I almost always use either black or white anyway.
Once you have your poem looking like you want it to, it is really easy to download it from there. It gives you several options. I usually just chose jpg.
If you noticed in the subtitle of this article I wrote “and Sometimes Medium”. Originally, as I was posting the poems, I added pictures back on to Medium. I included links to the original poems on Medium as well, but I noticed that some of the publications removed the original poems when I did this, so I immediately stopped doing it. I have quite a few poems that I posted directly onto my own Medium page, so I will eventually post the Instagram versions of those on Medium again, but out of respect for the many Medium publications that have been kind enough to publish my poetry in the first place, I decided not to re-post any of my work that has already been published in Medium publications.
The picture is one of my own that I uploaded to Canva. I simply split the Instagram Post work space in half, pasted the poem on the right side, and then added the background color. To add the photo, paste and adjust the text, and add the background color took about 10 minutes total. Since I have been working with Canva, I have gotten faster and can usually do this in no more than 5–7 minutes including uploading it to Instagram.
The results on Instagram have been great. When I started about two weeks ago I had about 140 followers. Since then I’m up to over 700. Currently I’m adding around 100 followers a day. I’ve also been learning the value of hashtags and I’m slowly beginning to use them more effectively. Each of my poems on Instagram average around 20 views a day. I try to post 2–3 poems or photos a day.
Not bad for a guy who a very short time ago thought Instagram was nothing more than a place to park your selfies.