Acclaimed by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, as “the most arresting and original new young poet”, 30-year-old Hera Lindsay Bird is one of the stars of the new generation of “Instapoets” – so called because of their use of social media – with hits including Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me from Behind and Monica, which riffs on the character from the sitcom Friends. She works in a bookshop in New Zealand. Hera Lindsay Bird is her first collection. She tours the UK this month.

Why did you call your debut collection Hera Lindsay Bird?
That’s my name! I was thinking about the great female pop stars of the 90s, when it was compulsory to name your first solo album after yourself, and if you were Janet Jackson, the second one too. But a lot of the first collections of poetry I owned were collected works and therefore all my Frank O’Hara and Emily Dickinson books were called “Frank O’Hara” or “Emily Dickinson”. I also thought that naming it after myself gave people permission to read it as a collection of personal poetry. I know it’s not fashionable to care about whether things in literature are true, but I can’t help it. I just want someone to tell me how to live.

In the first poem, Write a Book, you write: “You can get away with anything in a poem/ As long as you say my tits in it.” Is this an ironic comment on all the autobiographical sex in your work?
Yes, but then the next line is: “But it’s a false courage to be so modestly endowed… and have nothing meaningful to say.” People talk a lot about the sex in my book and to be honest it’s usually so banal or offhand I kind of forget it’s there until I end up having to read it aloud to a room full of children and distinguished arts patrons. When people talk about my book being provocative, it’s funny to me, because it’s really a trojan horse of sentimentality. I feel like I’ve put a leather jacket on over a Laura Ashley pyjama set and got away with it.

In that same poem, the first lines recall wetting yourself at a supermarket checkout when you were 14. Is there anything you would be too embarrassed to include in your work?
I’m always too embarrassed to include things, but I write them down thinking I will never publish them and then after about a day they don’t embarrass me any more. It’s the cheapest kind of therapy.

“The official theme of all my poems is/ You get in love and then you die,” you write. One critic described you as “simultaneously the most romantic and anti-romantic of poets”. Would you call yourself a romantic? Do you write love poems?
Yes, and yes! I don’t know what being a romantic really entails, apart from in the Lord Byron sense of sitting around a lake in jodhpurs playing with miniature boats and fucking your sister, but most of my poems I would describe as love poems. I feel like being a romantic implies you have an optimistic world view of romance, which is not the case, and I do enjoy watching public wedding proposals where women turn men down, but I am sentimental to the core.

Monica was a huge viral hit. Why do you think it touched such a nerve?
God, I have no idea. Again, that poem is a trojan horse. It’s pretending to be about 90s sitcoms when it’s really about not knowing how to say something you need to say. I picked Friends, because it was so ubiquitous, but it could almost have been about anything. My idea was to write a love poem that was meaningful to me but which was ostensibly about something totally banal and unrelated, and what was more banal than a psychological rundown of a stock sitcom character? It was a way of writing about something I couldn’t write about yet. People talk to me about Friends all the time now, which is funny, because I don’t really care about Friends. I really should have written it about Frasier or Third Rock from the Sun instead, because I adore them both and could talk about them for hours.

“To be bisexual is to be out of office, even to yourself,” you write in Bisexuality – do you use poetry to explore your own sexuality?
I wrote that poem when I was in my first queer relationship and was trying to figure the whole thing out. I had this idea that the queer community would be more open and egalitarian, but the reality of it was very difficult and isolating. I had a falsely optimistic idea that being queer meant being able to bypass some of the usual pitfalls of heterosexuality, when it was a lot more complicated than that. This poem was partly in response to the backlash against the stereotyping of bisexual people, which I get, but which really sucks all the joy out being gay. If the population at large thinks you’re fucking people indiscriminately and wearing leopard-print while stealing diamonds during the cold war, why not embrace it? That’s my perspective.

Why do you think such an ancient form is finding a new popularity through social media? And why do you think female poets in particular are finding such an enthusiastic audience?
I think the fact that poetry is so easy to make and disseminate and share probably has a lot to do with it – the overheads are low. I work in a bookshop and most of the poetry books I sell are to women in their teens and 20s. I find it deeply cool and encouraging. That’s why the backlash against “Instagram” poetry is so outlandish to me. The people raging about it are never the intended audience, so it just seems like sour raisins, which is like sour grapes left out in the sun too long. I love both Chekhov and The Babysitters Club and refuse to give either up. Every time someone complains about Instagram poetry being bad, I like to remind them that TS Eliot was basically responsible for the musical Cats. Besides, there’s only so much love poetry I can take from all those great men who sent their wives to asylums.

There’s a fair bit of hate and heartbreak in your poems. I loved the line: “This is like putting on mascara to cry yourself to sleep”. Do you “write from a wound”, to quote Jeanette Winterson?
I do, because it’s honest and therefore necessary, but I also try and reel it in. To me, my pain is mostly uninteresting and tends to make me both boring and stupid. When I’m unhappy, I just want to watch Judge Judy and drink cask wine, which is obviously not the case for everyone, but I have to try and keep my sense of humour about me when writing about painful things, otherwise my poetry gets thin and weak and melodramatic. Learning the conditions under which you write well has been one of my personal lessons and I’ve found that being miserable is not especially generative for me.

I read that you were conceived in a commune… I’m guessing this means your parents are cool with reading so much about your private life.
My parents are cool as hell. At my book launch, my friend Mitch made badges that say “Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me from Behind” and my mother forgot to take it off and got lots of very strange looks the next day. I was extremely lucky to grow up surrounded by books and jokes. It would never have occurred to me to tone things down for my parents, they’re just not like that.