It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t: the most honest, ferocious and experimental voices in 2025 are not in the bookstore. They live in vertical videos with lo-fi beats and a 22-year-old reading poetry into their phone.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
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Yes, we said it. TikTok — the platform that gave us dancing dentists and “how to make feta pasta” — is now also home to young poets, essayists and writing outsiders who can’t be bothered waiting for Gyldendal’s blessing. They write in the comments. They perform in bed. They publish themselves, and they get followers, likes and a direct line to their audience.
Welcome to the post-literary age, where you don’t need a publisher — just your voice and an algorithm confused enough to serve you to the right person.
Poetry in pyjamas and three seconds of reading time
It often begins with a simple image: a notebook, a cup of coffee, a face in half-darkness. The voice reads aloud — not because anyone asked them to, but because they couldn’t help themselves. There’s anger, vulnerability, satire, heartbreak and existential crisis. Not wrapped up. Not polished into “review-ready prose.” Just raw and honest.
We’ve seen videos with poems about placentas, rejected Tinder dates, and one person using the entire format to shout “I’m not done loving you!” into an empty room. Is it good? Sometimes not. But it’s alive. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of what sits on the shelves in the supermarket book section.
So where did the experiments actually go?
If you ask the publishing world, all of this is probably still seen as a digital sideshow. Something you might use for PR — but not take seriously as literature. But why, really? Has literature not always been carried by those who refused to fit in? Have we forgotten that the Beat poets were anarchists, and that autofiction was once a threat to literature’s “purity”?
TikTok poets follow the same path. They use the platform’s pace and aesthetics to play with form. Poems made up of a single line. Essays cut together like a music-video nightmare. Comment threads where people continue the text in real time. That is avant-garde, damn it — whether it tastes of hashtags and algorithm-friendly desperation or not.
Is it superficial? Maybe. Is it literature? Yes.
It takes courage to put yourself out there. Not in essays with titles like “Life in Three Chapters,” but in 27 seconds, where you just… are. TikTok removes the filter between sender and receiver. It is diary, manifesto and literary performance in one. And yes, of course there’s a lot of rubbish. But there are gems too. And they reach people. Not because someone approves them. But because someone feels them.
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TikTok may not be the answer to literature’s future, but it is a platform where the future is already writing. We can choose to dismiss it as noise. Or we can listen. Maybe there’s something in those 22 seconds of a poem about growing up without a language for what you feel. Maybe that is exactly where literature lives right now. In vertical format, with spelling mistakes and all.
