‘Instagram Poet’ wows sellout Ottawa crowd
Punjabi-Canadian poet has helped revive stagnant literary form for the masses
Had it existed, would T.S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath have published their poetry on Instagram?
They would have if, like Rupi Kaur, they wanted their work to be read by millions, instantly.
Kaur, 25, is likely the most famous poet you’ve never heard of — unless you’re one of the legions of mostly young women that make up her enormous fan base. Kaur’s first book of poetry — milk and honey — has sold two million copies and spent more than 80 straight weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, including a long stint at No. 1.
Her latest book, the sun and her flowers, was published in October and has quickly surged up the bestseller list too. Sunday night her book tour came to the Canadian Museum of History where she delivered a spoken word performance and held a Q&A session before a sellout of 600.
Kaur, a Punjabi-Canadian who was born in India but raised in Canada, writes simply and directly about the perils of love, self-empowerment and feminism, and about darker subjects such as physical and emotional abuse. Her writing is aimed directly at young women who make up most of her readers and 1.8 million Instagram followers. In many ways her poems look like the type of glib aphorisms scribbled into the back of a high school yearbook, complete with XOs and hearts.
The Guardian newspaper described Kaur and similar poets’ “winning formula: rupturing short confessional pieces with erratic line breaks to share hardwon truths.”
What can’t be denied is that Kaur’s audience is huge and has reinvigorated a literary form long consigned to the dusty back shelves of libraries and bookstores. milk and honey (like e.e. cummings, Kaur doesn’t use capital letters) easily outsold Margaret Atwood and John Grisham in 2017.
Kaur accompanies her poems with simple line drawings that are shared and retweeted by her many internet followers.
Lines like “Although the world can strip you of love, it does not mean that you will never be able to love again. It means that you will be able to love even greater” will make some readers’ eyes roll. And a cottage industry of Rupi Kaur parodies has spread online.
But before you dismiss Kaur as an ingenue, listen to her powerful seven-minute YouTube spokenword performance describing a rape and its aftermath.
“Every lover who touches me ends up feeling like you. Their fingers, you. Mouths, you. Until they’re not even the ones on top of me any more. It’s you,” she says.
“And I am so tired of doing things your way
“I’m tired of decorating this place with your shame as if it belongs to me.”
When Kaur took to the stage Sunday night at a microphone surrounded in a circle of red and white roses, her fans greeted her a warmly as a guest to their house party. In her breathy voice she switched between reading from her book and riffing spoken-word performance, sometimes accompanied by recorded music. She tackled themes of body image, sexuality, abuse (“the sound of her head crunching drywall”) and rape culture, eliciting cheers from the audience.
Parveen Kaur was one of the hundreds who paid $35 to see Kaur’s performance. At 37 and married, Kaur the fan has more life experience than Kaur the poet, but they share the same Punjabi heritage. Parveen Kaur says it doesn’t matter that Rupi Kaur is younger: Her poetry expresses a universal female experience.
“Obviously her poetry speaks for itself. It’s raw. It tells a story. She’s telling her story of a woman’s experience better than I ever could. It may be only two lines, but there is so much there in those two lines.”
Obviously her poetry speaks for itself. It’s raw. It tells a story. She’s telling her story of a woman’s experience better than I ever could.