Rupi Kaur, Apotheosis of Contemporary Poetry

What has everyone got against Rupi Kaur? To read the spate of recent articles attacking her isn’t to be confronted by a series of arguments as to why she’s a bad poet; it’s to have it asserted, over and over again, that she’s not a poet at all. In a subtly vicious profile in The Cut last fall, Molly Fischer portrayed Kaur not as a writer but as a cunning marketer more interested in the art on a book’s cover than the words on its pages. More recently, in PN Review, Rebecca Watts wrote a trenchant essay in which she lumped Kaur in with Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest as writers she would not review because she refused to admit that their work deserved even to be considered as poetry. Responding to Watts’ article in The Guardian, Don Paterson remarked (parenthetically) that “few poets consider [Kaur] a poet at all.”

And then, on January 24^th in The Baffler, Soraya Roberts suggested that Kaur’s work has nothing to do with contemporary poetry, but rather is a product of consumer capitalism and social media. In one of the key passages of her argument, Roberts situates Kaur outside the legitimate poetry world and among the “Instapoets,” a term that refers to the poets who got their start posting on Instagram, although many have now gone on to publish more traditionally. Both Watts and Roberts are drawing a line between Rupi Kaur and something they never quite define, but which we might call “real” or “legitimate” poetry (and which presumably maps closely to what they would call “good poetry”). They don’t agree on exactly where to draw the line—Watts casts out slam poets like McNish and Tempest, while Roberts welcomes them back in—but they both agree that Kaur is firmly outside it. It almost seems the whole purpose of drawing the line is to exclude Kaur. Line drawing can be problematic, though, and while Roberts’ “Instapoetry” category seems like a handy way of making the division she wants, she has no sooner established it than she runs up against Warsan Shire and has to start shifting the boundaries. The problem is that Shire is also an “Instapoet,” technically, and yet Roberts is very keen not to damn her work along with that of Kaur and the other Instapoets she enumerated (with an acidly-ironic tally of their likes) earlier in the essay. What to do? Special pleading comes to the rescue: while it’s true that Shire’s work has appeared on Instagram, she’s really more of a Twitter or Tumblr poet (another genre of social media poetry!), which means her work is more focused on outrage than affirmation. The implication seems to be that outrage-based Twitter poetry is good, while affirmation-based Instagram poetry is bad. I belabour this point not to be mean-spirited or nit-picky, but because it illuminates the extents to which all these writers go to insist that Rupi Kaur is not a real poet. It is as if Kaur needs to be quarantined in the hermetically sealed category of “Instapoetry” and read only by those wearing hazmat suits, to prevent her contagion from spreading. This concern with drawing a line between Kaur and “genuine” contemporary poetry runs through all these essays. But why? Roberts’ argument that Kaur’s success tells us nothing about poetry, but a great deal about our social-media-saturated consumer culture, is a strong one, and irrefutable as far as it goes; there’s no denying that those realities have shaped her work and its reception. But is that really all it can tell us? Isn’t it possible that the work of the bestselling contemporary poet in the world today might also tell us something about contemporary poetry?

Isn’t it possible that the work of the bestselling contemporary poet in the world today might also tell us something about contemporary poetry?

Contemporary poetry is a fusion of the Romantic and Modernist traditions. In the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth proposes a poetry that focuses on “the incidents of common life” and uses them to trace “the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” Wordsworth didn’t invent this approach, of course—Sappho’s lyrics do precisely that—but Wordsworth was reacting against the grand historical and mythological subject matter of poetry, and particularly Paradise Lost, by making “common life” his focus. Many of Wordsworth’s shorter poems function in this way, taking an experience from the poet’s life and universalizing it through an intense description that makes the reader feel as though they are sharing in it (“I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” or “Nutting,” for example). The Modernists rebelled against the neat artificiality of rhymed and metered Edwardian quatrains, in favour of a freer approach to verse. Ezra Pound, arguably the arch-modernist, wrote of this period, “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” and in his own career shows the progress of the movement. His early work, up to and including “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” contains quite a few poems that use rhyme and metre; the Cantos become progressively freer until, by the end, much of the verse—and perhaps the history of English poetry itself—seems to be collapsing into fragments before our eyes. By taking the personal, Wordsworthian strain of Romanticism and filtering it through the Modernist rejection of form, mainstream contemporary poets have created a style of free verse lyric that focuses on the individual mind’s response to the experience of being in the world. Most contemporary poems convey moments of heightened intensity in the poet’s life, when the poet is overwhelmed by powerful feeling or comes to a recognition of some larger idea or pattern of existence—what we might call an “epiphanic” approach to poetry. This style has become so dominant as to be almost synonymous with the word “poetry,” and most of what appears in mainstream journals and small press books will comfortably fit into this category of the personal lyric in free verse. But once you abandon rhyme and metre, you raise the question of what it is that makes a particular utterance poetic. Contemporary poetry’s answer is, in a word, language: poetry is the thoughts and feelings of the poet, expressed not directly but in densely figurative language characterized by simile, metaphor, and imagery—which is not to say that poetic language didn’t exist in earlier poetry, but it was in addition to other poetic qualities. Conveniently enough, a comparison of a few of Kaur’s poems with a couple by Shire (whom Roberts was so keen to separate from the “Instapoets”) will illustrate this likeness. Here’s one by Kaur:

if i knew what safety looked like i would have spent less time falling into arms that were not

And another:

i am a museum full of art but you had your eyes shut

And another:

i am water soft enough to offer life tough enough to drown it away

And another:

i don’t know what living a balanced life feels like when i am sad i don’t cry, i pour when i am happy i don’t smile, i beam when I am angry i don’t yell, i burn the good thing about feeling in extremes is when i love i give them wings but perhaps that isn’t such a good thing cause they always tend to leave and you should see me when my heart is broken i don’t grieve i shatter

For comparison, here is “Her Blue Body Full of Light” by Warsan Shire:

Can you believe I have cancer? Yosra asks, a mug of tea between her hands, almost laughing, hair cut close to her scalp. I imagine the cancer auditioning inside her body, tiny translucent slivers of light weaving in and out and of her abdomen and uterus, travelling up and through her throat, needlepoints of light, fireworks glimmering down, the body burning into itself, deep sea blue inside her body, her ribcage an aquarium, the cancer spreading and spreading, deep space, her throat a lava lamp, sparklers beneath breastbone— a lightshow, a million tiny jellyfish, orchestral womb, kaleidoscopic ovaries, disco ball heart, her skin glowing and glowing, lit from the inside

And this is the opening of “Home” (the full poem is online):

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.

If you see vast chasms of unbridgeable distance between their work, then you’re looking at too closely. If you expand your perspective to take in the last 600 years of English poetry, I think you’ll have to admit that Kaur and Shire have a lot more in common with each other than either one has with any poet who was writing a century or two ago—any poet we’re still reading today, that is. Nevertheless, you can see why Roberts would distinguish them. The difference isn’t one of content or of form, or even of the presence or absence of “outrage”; the difference is one of language. There is a heightened intensity to Shire’s language, a supercharged quality that we recognize immediately as “poetic,” despite the absence of rhyme or metre. “Her Blue Body Full of Light” displays contemporary poetry’s essential convention, in that it has no poetic qualities other than figurative language. After the first three lines, which set up the situation, the poem is just a series of increasingly extreme images and metaphors for the cancer in the woman’s body, each one upping the ante on the last until she seems ready to explode off the page. Kaur’s language, by contrast, is rather pedestrian, and when she attempts to be more figurative, she ends up with either obvious clichés like “i don’t cry, i pour,” or simplistic metaphors like “i am water” and the weirdly-awkward “i am a museum full of art.” She has nothing that compares say, with Shire’s striking image of “home” as “the mouth of a shark,” which is powerful because it is so unexpected.

In doing away with poetic language, Kaur also does away with the requirement that her readers do any interpretive work.

But perhaps Kaur’s success comes from precisely this simplicity and obviousness. In doing away with poetic language, she also does away with the requirement that her readers do any interpretive work—her poems are, emphatically, not highly-wrought verbal objects. Quite the contrary: they are immediately recognizable sentiments expressed in direct and unadorned language. If they were printed in prose we might think of them as, at best, aphorisms, and at worst, diary entries. If they were printed on a cushion, we might even find them clever—context is everything, after all. Those who criticize Kaur for not being a “real” poet seem to assume that this difference is attributable to incompetence; that is, Kaur would write like Shire if she could, but she can’t. But what if Kaur’s style is actually a conscious artistic choice? Was Pound incapable of rhyme, or did he choose to abandon it? Was Wordsworth incapable of writing on a grand mythological subject, or did he just choose not to? In both cases, I think it’s clear that their work was carefully thought out. Maybe Kaur’s rejection of figurative language is, too. Apparently, a lot of readers are satisfied with poems that aren’t worked up to the pitch of metaphorical intensity that we see in Shire’s writing. Kaur focuses on feelings and experiences that are relatable for her audience, and—most important of all in the social media landscape—the qualities that make her poems connect so immediately also make them eminently shareable. In terms of reaching an audience, at least, what she’s doing is working. Writers like Watts and Roberts draw attention to the flat, direct style that has made Kaur so successful in order to argue that she is not a “real” poet. But the voices saying Kaur doesn’t fit in contemporary poetry are so insistent, it’s hard not to wonder if she might fit there all too neatly, and if that is why many are so eager to exclude her. If you look at it in the context of English literary history, what’s actually striking about Kaur’s work is not how different it is, but how closely it follows almost all the conventions of mainstream contemporary poetry. There is the total abandonment of rhyme and metre, obviously; the use of the first-person voice (does any word occur more frequently in Kaur’s poems than “i”?); and the recounting of incidents and feelings from the poet’s own life (you could almost construct her biography from milk & honey). She has simply dropped the overheated language—and, curiously, this choice could be seen as an element of the Wordsworthian aesthetic; the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads also talks about abandoning the “gaudiness” of poetic language. Kaur has jettisoned the last vestige of the “poetic” from her work (figurative language), and maintained only the bare minimum required to qualify it as poetry (line breaks). That is why it is so tempting—and so easy—to dismiss her work; it invites the criticism that what she is writing isn’t really poetry, it just looks like it is. But is that a fair judgment? We have, after all, accepted the Romantic idea that poetry should focus on the individual consciousness. And we have accepted the Modernist idea that poetry is better off without rhyme and metre. Why aren’t we talking about Kaur as a revolutionary who has thrown off the densely-figurative language that constitutes contemporary poetry’s main aesthetic? Instead, we are reacting with the same outraged backlash that greeted the Modernists in their time, and the Romantics in theirs. Of course, it’s always easier to see value in throwing off the conventions of the past—conventions that, by definition, have already been thrown off—than those of the present. That’s why visionaries have such a rough time of it. But because the conventions she’s shaking off are our own, we are blind to what she’s doing. No one seems to want to do it, but it really isn’t that difficult to draw a line from the Romantics to Kaur and argue that she isn’t a bizarre, aberrant phenomenon that has sprung up in the vicinity of contemporary poetry, but contemporary poetry’s logical end point—its entropic collapse into the black hole of solipsism that it has been flirting with for so long. Stripped of rhyme, stripped of metre, stripped of any figurative language beyond the most jejune simile and imagery, Kaur reveals the essential barrenness of the subject matter behind the hyped-up language of contemporary poetry: banal statements about how the poet is doing today. Poetry as status updates. Her complete abandonment of technical skill (which reads as authenticity to her fans and as incompetence to her critics) may make Rupi Kaur the avatar of the next poetic revolution, remaking the art form by getting rid of its conventionally “poetic” features, just as the Romantics and the Modernists did before her. But relax—that’s probably not the case. Most likely, interest in her will fizzle out over the next few years, and she’ll be remembered, if at all, as a sort of Robert Fulghum of poetry. Perhaps she herself will lose interest in poetry and leverage the brand equity of her name in other ventures, like Kanye West did through his clothing line; that strikes me as the most likely scenario. But perhaps we’re underestimating her. Perhaps, in a century or two, literary scholars will look back on her as the writer who definitively changed the course of poetry and created the world of the future, a world in which everyone will be a poet simply because anyone can be.