To not understand the hype around Rupi Kaur poems? (examples attached)

[instagrampoets]

Sorry couldn't find a poetry board (though if there is one please redirect me!)

I just don't understand the hype around these poems? Her book collection "Milk and Honey" was huge, especially amongst young people and I'm wondering if this is a niche of poetry I'm missing the depth of. Most of it just sounds like a passing thought, or an Instagram caption.

Sorry, don't want to sound like a snob or portray myself as a poetry aficionado but I'm interested to see if anyone else can ascribe any deeper meaning to her work or if I'm just thinking too hard about it all!

I like Rupi Kaur but I also like lots of more traditional or highbrow poetry too. If something is expressed in a way we can relate to then I don't think it matters how it's written. I like this one, I think it's a good message for younger women especially

[quote Herja]@Lobelia123 The Emperor's Babe. I just posted it, but it sounds like what you're after. It's a blend of modern and ancient in its setting, with gorgeous use of language, but very readable. Key themes around sexuality, home, female strength and identity (but not in a woke way). It's made of hundreds of poems, but which flows together as a novel.

It's easily accessible, but you can add as many layers of meaning as you want to really.[/quote]
Wow - fabulous, thank you!

It's just a wee bit on the nose though, is it not @Shoxfordian? I guess I just see that as trying to appeal to the "woke" demographic of feminism that might enjoy her poetry- it's not particularly new or interestingly put, from my perspective (though I do agree with the meaning behind it).

Maybe I'm just a grumpy old bugger

Yeah it is, I don't think anyone could accuse her poems of being particularly high artform but there's lots of girls and young women who don't already know this particular message and if they find this on insta and like it then that's got to be a good thing. Maybe she is cynically appealing to the woke market but it's working for her, we can't all like the same stuff

@instagrampoets

All of you sneering at what is poetry and what is not, isn't it an expression of your life experiences and feelings, in many forms and styles, just as we as people are different in so many ways? Why is the way you express that acceptable as 'art' / 'poetry' or not, depending on some arbitrary high gilded standard?You all sound a bit pretentious and humourless to be honest.

I understand what you mean, and I definitely am quite a pretentious person by nature if I'm honest @Lobelia123. But similarly I think this style of writing is quite pretentious and affected too! I do still really love poetry and I love talking about it, and I'm interested in which poems of Kaur's struck a chord with you. I just haven't found any that I consider powerful yet, but I think I'm allowed to consider it a load of wank (as a PP eloquently put it ) just as you are allowed to consider it emotional and meaningful.

Hi again, its actually a while since I read it, so I would have to go back, but what I enjoyed was the way the different poems built up to give an overall feeling of the whole anthology - I think few of them are super strong on their own, but taken all together, I felt like they told a story of growth and how a person changes through their experiences. I also liked the fact that they were all very sparse with words....I dont like too many fancy words all piled up - simple and clear is what gets through to me :)

This one seems applicable to lots of relationship board issues too.

That's true, I guarantee she's wealthier and more well-known than me so kudos to her! I'm glad to hear it's also potentially a bridging gap for young people into poetry, but it in-and-of-itself is a bit pants in my opinion.

May have to harangue MNHQ for a Poetry forum though (if there isn't already one that I've missed!)

I like this one because I really relate to it

I'll leave this with you...

I like these ones

@Lobelia123

What I loved about Milk and Honey was that it was poetry....but also a story, like a book. If you read it cover to cover, you went along with her on her journey and the poems did not end at the end of the page, but the thoughts, themes and experiences all moved together in a kind of emotional life story that became clearer and clearer as you came to the end. I loved it!

All of you sneering at what is poetry and what is not, isn't it an expression of your life experiences and feelings, in many forms and styles, just as we as people are different in so many ways? Why is the way you express that acceptable as 'art' / 'poetry' or not, depending on some arbitrary high gilded standard?You all sound a bit pretentious and humourless to be honest. If she wrote something that is meaningful to her, and others read it and it struck a chord of honesty and relevance to them, then surely thats all that matters?

Personally, no, I don't think poetry is an expression of your life experiences and feelings. (And I think that's an incredibly pretentious statement too!)

Why do you think it is?

I don't think it should matter that we disagree about what poetry is, but it slightly irritates me when people put out a definition as if it couldn't possibly be questioned.

What's poetry got to do with feelings? Or life experiences? Surely about 90% of the world's poems have bugger all to do with the poet's life experiences - that's why loads of them are about imagined situations and fantasies and things that don't exist.

I find it really frustrating that, when we're talking about a subject like painting, it seems to be acceptable for someone to say 'I know what I like and I like this' and for someone else to say 'I can tell you about the amount of skill it takes to do these brush strokes' or 'I am blown away by this because for the time it was painted it was really original and amazing'.

We should do the same with literature. It should be ok to say both 'I really like Rupi Kaur' and also to say she's not writing formally, thematically or linguistically complicated stuff.

For me, this is prose.

If you like this kind of Poetry.. try RH Sin.

I have all his books, and honestly, some of the thoughts and expressions and statements in them helped me through one of the worst times in my life... it helped me realise i wasn't happy in my abusive marriage.

I've written poetry for years, i find these short 'prose' poetry style fascinating and very freeing, they have ther own style and cadence and can be very insightful.

Don't dismiss what they offer just because its not 'traditional' poetry.

@Shoxfordian

Yeah it is, I don't think anyone could accuse her poems of being particularly high artform but there's lots of girls and young women who don't already know this particular message and if they find this on insta and like it then that's got to be a good thing. Maybe she is cynically appealing to the woke market but it's working for her, we can't all like the same stuff

It's a great message about not conforming to gendered body fascism. Inserting line breaks doesn't make it a poem, though -- it's a perfectly good meme, which should be applauded.

@Muckish

Technically it's a poem, according to the Cambridge dictionary definition

apieceof writing in which the words arearrangedinseparatelines, oftenendinginrhyme, and arechosenfortheirsoundand for theimagesandideastheysuggest

It's fair to say you don't think it's a good poem but that doesn't mean it isn't one

Ooh that definition didn't like copy and paste. Maybe that's another form of poetry, running all the words together like that

"apieceof writing in which the words arearrangedinseparatelines, oftenendinginrhyme, and arechosenfortheirsoundand for theimagesandideastheysuggest"

• shoxfordian

(the newest form of insta poetry! )

Ooh I quite like them. Might buy this Milk and Honey book!

@OunceOfFlounce is right, IMO. It's prose with erratic line breaks.

The way you speak of yourself, the way you degrade yourself into smallness, is abuse.

I can't wrap my head around the fact that I have to convince half the world's population that my body is not their bed. I am busy learning the consequences of womanhood when I should be learning science and maths instead.

It's impossible for one person to fill you up in all the ways you need to be filled. One person cannot be your everything.

Of these three, the first and third could easily pop up on MN threads. The second would sound a little odd in the first person but you I don't think it would ever be thought of as especially poetic. I'm in no position to really say what is and isn't poetry and if I came across one in this style as one poem of a whole anthology, I wouldn't think anything of it. But to me, this is the poetic equivalent of drawing a single line of paint on a canvas and then selling it for thousands.

Well it can’t be that hyped as it has passed me by completely.

It looks like the contemporary equivalent of those deep and meaningful motivational posters with dolphins on.

YY, I agree @TeenyTinyDustinHoffman.

IMO that Cambridge definition of a poem needs to say that those features - line breaks, rhyme, whatever - need to be doing something. If they're just shoved in there and you can't tell the difference when it's written as prose, what's the point?

Whereas the Wendy Cope someone quoted up thread is doing something funny with the line break and the rhyme, and if you wrote it as prose it wouldn't be half as clever.

I'm wondering if this is a niche of poetry I'm missing the depth of

There is no depth. It's "poetry" (its not poetry) for late-millennials and zoomers, insubstantial and insta-ble and vacuous in the extreme.

I know poetry is meant to facilitate a response, but I kind of get the same second-hand cringe I do when looking back at some of the cliched utter shite poetry I used to write. Except this is celebrated and is one of the bigger gateways to the mainstream when it comes to poetry.

But to me, this is the poetic equivalent of drawing a single line of paint on a canvas and then selling it for thousands. I heartily agree, @TeenyTinyDustinHoffman. It's stuff that seems to strike a chord if you don't think about it too much, but when you actually analyse it as a piece of work it falls apart (IMO).

@Shoxfordian

Ooh that definition didn't like copy and paste. Maybe that's another form of poetry, running all the words together like that

Admit it, @Shoxfordian, you did that on purpose to invent a new poetic form.

I don't think, though, that RK pays any attention at all to words, or to their sound and the images they suggest, as your dictionary definition suggests.

I agree with @TeenyTinyDustinHoffman -- RP's writing is just prose truisms of the kind you frequently encounter on Mn, with line breaks inserted. Take out the lineation and you lose nothing. There's no significant use of rhythm, alliteration, repetition, internal rhyme, assonance, and the thought itself isn't interesting or surprising. She only gets compared to Imagism or Rumi by people who've never read either.

Oh lord, its like those awful Facebook posts full of empty rhetoric people post, usually on a sunset-esque background. It's the Live, Love, Laugh/Be Kind of poetry. Rather nauseating.