This essay is the fifth in a series for National Poetry Month on Pittsburgh’s literary history and the role of poetry in public published in conjunction with the International Poetry Forum.
Did an Instagram post by the International Poetry Forum—a local nonprofit organization I now direct—accidentally inspire a student revolution in Pittsburgh, one that led to the creation of a new Department of Classics at Carnegie Mellon University?
Despite the congratulatory messages I have received from friends and strangers, the answer is no. The article linked above (which is now helpfully flagged with the word “SATIRE” in its title) was published in this year’s Aprils Fools’ edition of The Tartan, Carnegie Mellon’s student newspaper.
It’s a hilarious piece—funny without being mean—that imagines a scenario in which one of the International Poetry Forum’s educational videos (on the Ancient Greek word polytropos) incites a humanities uprising on Carnegie Mellon’s campus. Inspired by a newfound love of Homer, fraternity members scramble to study and reclaim the Greek origins of their names; meanwhile, the upper administration begins communicating with the student body in Latin, Sanskrit, and even cuneiform. The article is at once a serious apology for the value of the humanities and a self-parodying limit case where the classics run rampant, and scholars begin shirking live languages in favor of dead ones. At the heart of the article is a real love of literature, something I have encountered (doomsayers disregarded) from many students across Pittsburgh.
I had never met the student author of this article, so this shout-out to the International Poetry Forum (which, as an independent nonprofit, is not affiliated with any university) came as a welcome surprise. When I was alerted to the fact that our name appeared in a student’s April Fools article, I was certain that poetry would be the butt of the joke. But to the contrary – here was a thoughtful piece that actually made poetry the hero of the story. And while the article’s scenario was fictional, the reference to the International Poetry Forum is based in reality: our short video on polytropos does exist, and it really has accrued over one million views across social media platforms.
For context, the International Poetry Forum has three charitable focuses. We host a poetry reading series that has welcomed to Pittsburgh hundreds of poets and performers from over fifty countries, including greats like W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Chinua Achebe, Mary Oliver, Grace Kelly, Gregory Peck, James Earl Jones, and Queen Noor of Jordan. We also host a poets-in-the-schools program, which launched with assistance from local poets and educators (Fred Rogers among them) nearly sixty years ago. The third focus of the International Poetry Forum has involved various approaches to the development of resources for the study of poetry, both in print and online, including recent forays onto social media.
I am now 32; our founder, Samuel Hazo, is about to turn 98. Several friends have assumed that developing educational content for social media was my idea—but the opposite is true. Hazo has been a champion of poetry for nearly a century as an educator, as director of the Forum, and as past Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania. His work has always (and unpretentiously) focused on getting poetry to as broad an audience as possible, whether that involved hosting Myron Cope and Lynn Swann for a poetry reading or launching a poetry-on-the-radio series on local and national stations. YouTube seemed like the obvious next step for this mission—and to that end, social media was his idea: one night, Hazo called me to chat about YouTube, suggesting I make a few recordings to share as free mini-lectures.
Initially, I was hesitant. The Forum never had a social media presence, and I myself have lived most of my life with an aversion to social media. I am, like most, convinced its effects on attention are ruinous; as a parent, it terrifies me. And yet, after outlining this all to Hazo, and after speaking with hundreds of students through our poets-in-the-schools program, we concluded that if young people were stuck on these platforms, we may as well put some poetry out there to see what sticks. Hopefully, we said, we might encourage a handful of viewers to close the apps and head to the bookshelf.
Just over a year ago, we finalized our basic content development strategy and launched our (primarily Instagram-based) educational series in earnest. As a single-employee organization, I develop the content and edit the footage myself, usually in fifteen-minute windows between meetings. Some of our content features poets reading their poetry; other content features me at my desk offering a two- or three-minute breakdown of a poetic concept like assonance or alliteration.
Since very little seemed to exist in the way of educational poetry content on social media, and since conventional wisdom held that it is difficult to gain traction with educational content of any kind, my hopes were modest. For our first year, we set a goal of 100,000 total views across platforms. A few of our larger peers had around 200,000 annual views, so our goal felt ambitious, especially given the minimal time and resources we had to devote to the work.
And yet, by the end of 2025, we ended up—miraculously, it feels—with over twelve million views across channels, growing in Instagram follower count to surpass significantly larger national benchmarks like the National Book Foundation and Poets & Writers. At our current growth rate, we’re about two weeks away from surpassing the Pulitzer Prize account.
This growth has had several unexpected benefits. Beyond the direct benefit of people from around the world engaging with the educational content (and, through the content, with Pittsburgh’s literary history), we have had audience members visit our series from around the country, and even around the world. More importantly, teachers of all grade levels have reached out about incorporating our content in their curricula; and indeed, the video comments demonstrate genuine student engagement with the poems.
I want to emphasize that I deserve approximately zero credit for this phenomenon. In the earliest videos, you can see me rocking my newborn to sleep. I had virtually no free time to record, and I only expected a handful of friends to view the clips. Once things went vertical, I swapped out the baby for our dog, Frodo Waggins, who now sits on my lap for most videos (and who does deserve the bulk of the credit for this sudden success).
We have since made a video outlining our approach, which we have been sharing with other nonprofit organizations in Pittsburgh. If you are a nonprofit in town that’s keen to chat, please do reach out. For the time being, I’ll share three reasons why I think our content has been successful, which will ultimately take us back to what I consider to be a very real humanities and classics renaissance in Pittsburgh.
The most straightforward reason for our social media growth is precisely the thing I thought would make it difficult for us to grow: our content aims to be educational. As one colleague put it, many cultural institutions see social media simply as a way to keep the public abreast of their projects and events. This is an excellent use for social media—the only problem is that it remains extremely difficult for promotional content to reach new audiences. On the other hand, it turns out that there is a real hunger for literary engagement and education online, so educational content can ultimately serve as a means of follower growth. Even for organizations that are just looking to promote their events, the educational content can be implicitly promotional: a clip talking about the history of a paint pigment might double as an excuse to talk about a new gallery opening, for example.
The second reason is technical. The algorithms are currently structured to promote very specific types of content, and while many undergraduates in their dorm room are up on the latest, relatively few institutions keep up. We began by creating only text and image posts, which averaged a dozen or two dozen likes apiece. We soon realized that this issue wasn’t related to the quality of our posts; it was related (quite arbitrarily) to the kinds of content being promoted at a given point in time.
At present, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are battling over the short-form video space and therefore push reels-based content over most everything else. To illustrate: over the past 30 days, the International Poetry Forum’s Instagram page has gained 1.4 million views and 8,296 new followers, of which only twelve new followerscame from image-based posts. The good news—especially for smaller organizations like us—is that the barrier to entry for creating video content is extremely low. A viral video need not be high-quality; I film most clips on my phone at home. But Instagram and its peers do privilege content that follows its “rules”: for example, videos uploaded at the correct quality, framerate, and aspect ratio (for Instagram, 30fps and at least 1080p). Instagram has a button in its settings that determines whether a video is uploaded at maximum quality; I have spoken with at least two organizations who had posted for months before realizing they were dooming their video performance because their settings were incorrectly configured.
Captions are also essential. Some nonprofits assume captions are difficult to add to videos, but several free editing apps (like Instagram’s native “Edits” app) generate captions automatically, which can be a huge boon to both engagement and accessibility. I have seen a few parties invest thousands in social media ads with minimal results; I believe it is ultimately cheaper (and more effective) to create content in-house.
The third reason for our sudden online growth has to do with the fact (as I have argued here, here, here, and here) that Pittsburgh has one of the most fascinating literary histories of any city in the world. Several of our frequent audience members now refer to the city as the “poetry capital” of the country. The International Poetry Forum is just one of several dozen literary organizations and reading series in town, and we have been proud to exist in a city that sees poetry as an expected part of public life.
Pittsburgh is a city that takes classic (and classical) literature as seriously as any city in the world. Even better, Pittsburgh does an especially good job of taking the classic and the contemporary side by side. For our part at the International Poetry Forum, we have hosted several events over the past few years that have blended the classic and contemporary. Earlier this week, U.K. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage flew to Pittsburgh (of all places!) for the world premiere of his new Gilgamesh translation at Heinz Memorial Chapel. The sold-out crowd included local poets, academics, and students of all ages, who were the first audience in the world to hear a public reading of the laureate’s new version of this several-thousand-year-old text.
Other recent International Poetry Forum events have featured contemporary poets reading their own work beside classic poets, including Kimiko Hahn with Matsuo Basho; Sir Andrew Motion with John Keats; Emily Wilson with Homer; Srikanth Reddy with various global literary traditions of poetry and the afterlife; and Judy Collins with classic folk songs alongside new poems. (Clips from all these events are viewable here.)
Nearly one century ago, a scholar reportedly declared to a group of classicists that “Petronius lives in Pittsburgh.” The same can be said today of both classic and contemporary literature. In the schools, in the libraries, in the bars, in the arts spaces—even on social media—poetry lives in Pittsburgh.
