Poetry for the many, not the few

Snapshots of Rupi Kaur’s poetry have been circulating Tumblr since 2013. Today, I logged onto the popular site for the first time in months (I promise it’s been months!) and found that I only needed to scroll past five posts to reach one of Kaur’s new poems from her second book, The Sun and Her Flowers, released on 3 October 2017. This discovery is mostly unsurprising since Kaur currently has nearly two million Instagram followers. Her first book, Milk and honey, reached the top spot of The New York Times bestseller list at the beginning of this year. It remained securely on the list for 52 weeks. Naturally, The Sun and Her Flowers was eagerly anticipated by many.

The simplicity of Kaur’s poetry has invited criticism, but it is this same simplicity that has captured the attention of so many people

Interestingly, along with her fans, Kaur has amassed a rather large group of criticizers. Many have taken to the internet to fragment everyday phrases, in order to mock Kaur’s employment of short lines and lack of punctuation.  The simplicity of Kaur’s poetry has invited the majority of its criticism, but it is this same simplicity that has captured the attention of so many people. Kaur says that she made deliberate stylistic choices in order to make her work accessible, asserting that “art should be available to the masses”. She explains, in her interview with WNYC Radio, that as she immigrated to Canada from India she did not know the English language until she was “well into elementary school”. So, the choices she makes are to ensure her poetry is “tailored to the person [she] was when [she] was growing up”.

While it is admirable that a writer aspires for their work to be accessible to everyone, what is most significant is that Kaur remembers her younger self while writing her poetry. Kaur started writing poetry in her youth and reveals in her Ted Talk titled I’m Taking My Body Back, that in a world where she was constantly moving, her poetry became the one constant in her life. She did not start writing for other people; she wrote, and I would say continues to write, for herself – her past and present self. Critics have doubted this sense of self, suggesting that Kaur could be guilty of plagiarizing the works of poets including Warsan Shire, and of creating a monolithic narrative for brown female experiences and trauma. However, Kaur’s fame is a direct result of a number of people finding her poetry provocative.

Kaur’s fame is indicative of an era where poetry can be written by anyone

In recent years there have been a number of creatives who have reached a wide audience after sharing their work on the internet. Through Button Poetry, an organisation dedicated to slam poetry, Neil Hilborn’s performance of his poem “OCD” has racked up 13 million views on Youtube. In the performance, Hilborn speaks about a past relationship and his battle with mental illness. He reveals how the exposure of his poetry has allowed him to release his own anthology.

Other creatives who have thrived in this digital era include Melissa Lozada-Oliva, who writes about her femininity and her Latina identity as an American. Kate Tempest, a young and critically acclaimed British playwright and poet, made waves on social media for her poem, Europe is Lost, for its hip hop style and honest word play. Going back to Kaur’s poetry, it is not the most sophisticated and it is not perfect, but there is plenty of sophistication to be found in a number of creatives operating today. Whether you are a fan or a critic of her work, Kaur’s fame is indicative of an era where poetry can be written by anyone, for everyone.