Popstar of Poetry
“Insta-poet” Rupi Kaur is at the forefront of a movement embodying short, raw verse, with arbitrary line-breaks and quick, often gut-punch-packing compositions
Poet rupi kaur’s writing needs no heavy analysis
Rupi Kaur, 24, is known to propel herself into spaces that weren’t conventionally designed for her. And dominate them. It’s not every day, for example, that a 22-year-old college student posts a picture of menstrual stains, only to have to wage war against the social media site which takes it down (“I will not apologise for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society,” she wrote back then. Her follower count grew sevenfold). It’s not every day, that a girl from a pind in Hoshiarpur, Punjab, finds herself on a New York
Times Bestsellers List, selling 1.4 million copies of her first book. And it’s not every day that a young, powerful voice of colour resonates the way Kaur’s does–whether for good or bad–across the world.
The insta-poet is known for her short, raw verse, with arbitrary linebreaks and quick, often gut-punchpacking poetry, dealing with subjects such as immigration, humanity, abuse, rape, alcoholism and feminism. [Our backs/tell stories/no books/have the spine to/
carry]. Criticised (and often ridiculed) for shooting to fame for what is perceived to be “easy”, Kaur is not unaware of the comments that flood her timelines. “It’s like contemporary art. When it became a movement, people would see a painting with just one dot on it and get annoyed and say, this is unfair, I could do this.” Kaur’s process is different for spoken word and internet poetry. “I would write long four-page poems and found that they were not as accepted in print as they were in spoken word. So, I would find the part that really made my stomach turn and put that out.”
Kaur’s writing, though sometimes the butt of piercing mockery, has its success attributed in part to the short attention span of millennials. The poetry she serves up is quick and often provocative, and almost always relatable. The latter being the salvation of a generation seeking validation and camaraderie on the internet. However, all 1.4 million copies of Milk and Honey, didn’t sell to millennials. And therein lies Kaur’s accomplishment–she’s treasured across generations.
At the age of four, Kaur moved to Toronto with her mother, to join her father, who worked as an electrician in Hoshiarpur. “Our pind is like a community. My mother said no one would ever let my feet touch the ground there,” she said. “And to suddenly move to Canada, it was very isolated.” The experience permeated into her emotional machinations and she recalls being teased by her father—“he thought I could cry at the snap of his fingers”. And this was true, she admits. Kaur thinks this helped with her writing.
Kaur grew up read everything from Amrita Pritam to Maya Angelou, Roald Dahl, Doctor Suess and Harry Potter. “You grow up with so much self-hate,” she said. “At home my parents would tell me not to go out in the sun because I’d become dark. At school, I would be told I have a very wide frame and I have hair here and hair there and I would just think, ‘I’m a mistake!’” She used poetry as a release. [We are all born/ so beautiful/the greatest tragedy is/being convinced we are not].
But her immigrant status didn’t tear Kaur away from her sikh identity, which, besides inspiring her writing, still gives her strength on a bad day. “Sikhs were slaughtered by Mughals. And they came out of it and that really hurts and empowers me at the same time. It tells me I have a culture which overcame.”
And Kaur has had her share of controversies to overcome too. A few months ago, Twitter users accused Kaur of plagiarising a fellow Tumblr poet, Nayyirah Waheed. And as with any news on the internet, the 140-character pitchforks came at her, sharpened with indignation. This incident, however, also led to a larger discourse on the poetry, experiences and narrative of women of colour writing in this new epigrammatic style. “I didn’t plagiarise,” says Kaur. “My experience probably represents one per cent, but my voice is important as is the voice of all those other experiences. We’re also going to have a lot of experiences that are very similar. But just because I write about it, and say, another young brown girl starts writing about sexual abuse, it would be unfair of me to say she’s plagiarising or appropriating,” she adds. Kaur believes it represents a point in time and compares it to the Renaissance or Victorian period. “Those periods got their names because there were movements happening at certain times that were echoed, certain metaphors, certain themes,” she says.
As Kaur gets ready to go on tour to promote her upcoming book, she says she was inspired by sunflowers “I thought what if we are all our own suns? And the flowers are different people and experiences we go through in life.” This five chapter book – Wilting, Falling, Rooting, Rising, Blooming – is essentially the journey through the life cycle of a plant, but tells “outward” as opposed to reflective stories about migration and other experiences. Though the process of writing this book was difficult for a severely self-critical Kaur, she soldiered through, writing tirelessly through the day. “As an artist who’s putting their stuff out there into the world, you’re never going to be enough. Somebody’s always going to be able to poke holes in you,” she said. “We need to focus on our work. That will outlive us and that will outlive the hate.”
“AS AN ARTIST PUTTING STUFF OUT INTO THE WORLD, YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH”