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!

Hah you're onto me @Muckish, I'll be onyour insta anydaynow

@Shoxfordian

Hah you're onto me *@Muckish*, I'll be onyour insta anydaynow

i willlook forwardto it @Shoxfordian

Maybe the next book could include the classic

I’m shit and I know I am
I’m shit and I know it
But I get paid
For this shit
So who’s stupid now?

I'd be interested to hear if this kind of "insta poetry" or style of writing is becoming more common

@instagrampoets - not if I can help it!

I agree Op. Its lazy AF poetry. i think poetry had a peak around 100 years ago, and people have just taken aspects of the modernist movement (which I did like) to make poetry easier whilst looking fancier- free verse, no structure, no rhyming ever, very short verse.

Have a look at Alice Oswald, shes still doing some really good readable but complex stuff.

And please dont think having decent standards in this stuff is being a snob. I really think poetry is not something everybody can do, and im actually glad of that. People wouldnt be very pleased being subjected to everybody having a go at a symphony and broadcasting it.

@instagrampoets

we can all write meaningful poems at our computer screens if we type a little like this

• instagrampoets

[quote TeenyTinyDustinHoffman]@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.[/quote]
Yes - the first and third pieces you've quoted aren't saying anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before.

The second one simply comes across as arrogant. The narrator is saying half the world wants to sleep with her? I doubt that's anyone's lived experience, no matter whether you interpret it in a sexual sense or otherwise.

It's fine not to like it, and it not be your thing, or not enjoy reading it.

When you slip over into taking the piss out of it for being 'less than' the traditional poetry style, you're being a snob.

If a Haiku can be an accepted art form, what wrong with Prose Poetry?

Why can't I take the piss out of it though, @Calabasa? I love poetry, and I love the discourse that comes with it. If you have poems of Kaur's you like feel free to share them!

(and FWIW, I really enjoy a lot of prose poetry and some haikus. For me it's not the style, it's the quality.)

I haven't got Kaur's book to hand :) Some of it was good though.

Currently reading through a Duet book between R,M Drake & RH Sin called "Empty Bottles Full of Stories"
'
"Letter to my Daughter"
Listen to the way
life slowly walks
out of her body

If there is any kind
of music
to be appreciated,

then it is there,
between the beats
of her heart

and the quiet exhale
of her breath.

So please,
love her
and love her well.

She is not meant
to live forever

but the idea
is to make her feel
as if
she is the center
of the universe...

every single day.

Amen

Thats one of RM Drakes poems from the book. It's very prose-y when you removed the spacing, but i still love the message and the sentiment, and there is something about the cadance of reading it as its printed that gives it that something else.

@Calabasa

It's fine not to like it, and it not be your thing, or not enjoy reading it.

When you slip over into taking the piss out of it for being 'less than' the traditional poetry style, you're being a snob.

If a Haiku can be an accepted art form, what wrong with Prose Poetry?

But no one is saying it's prose poetry, are they? I know that's an accepted genre.

We're saying it's prose, and not very good prose. I don't think that's taking the piss. There's something slightly off - superficial? - about it. She's using random line breaks to make people think the statements are deep and profound, whereas if you read them as prose you'd just think 'huh, ok'.

@user1471565182

Have a look at Alice Oswald, shes still doing some really good readable but complex stuff.

She's good, and there are a lot of really good poets writing now Paula Meehan, Leanne O'Sullivan, Seán Hewitt it's just that Rupi Kaur isn't one of them.

Totally fine not to like them. Not fair to suggest that they're shit because they're popular with young women & on Instagram. That's a big old helping of the patriarchy, telling us to dislike things because young women think that they're good.

Compared to RH Sin.. some of his stuff in written in paragraph style, so its unmistakably prose and a statement of thought, and other stuff is written in a poem pattern.

so you go from

"The Painful Pursuit"
Chasing love, I'm tired. Wired an awake,
restless and weary. My heart cant take another
tumble to the floor. My mind still aches from
all this overthinking. It's overwhelming the way
this pursuit of everything i deserve only brings
me more of what I don't want. I've been chasing
you, and I'm tired.

to

"skhxxii"
your lips made me forget
my reason to be unhappy
you kissed me
and i lost that dreadful feeling

and he switches between using punctuation, and not.. some are double spaced lines, others not.. its very curious but each little piece, be it 2 lines, 4 or 50, they all have their own rhythm to reading them.

@LittleGwyneth

Totally fine not to like them. Not fair to suggest that they're shit because they're popular with young women & on Instagram. That's a big old helping of the patriarchy, telling us to dislike things because young women think that they're good.

I think that's absolutely true.

I enjoy Nikita Gill too, some of her pieces are quite profound when you sit and contemplate on them.

@Muckish oh that was me in my Cambridge interview many years ago. I loved reading but thought what I read wouldn’t sound fancy enough and the set texts/other books by those writers were a safer bet.

Oh well, I ended up having a great time at Manchester.

Here's a website where you have to guess if a 'poem' is by rupi kaur or if it's a random lot of nonsense generated by computer.

eugenekudashev.com/rupi-or-not/

[quote drivingmisspotty]@Muckish oh that was me in my Cambridge interview many years ago. I loved reading but thought what I read wouldn’t sound fancy enough and the set texts/other books by those writers were a safer bet.

Oh well, I ended up having a great time at Manchester.[/quote]
This makes me think about why I'm bothered by people insisting we shouldn't criticise Rupi Kaur and we should all just accept that poetry is about emotion or experience or whatever.

If someone says in a Cambridge interview that they love Rupi Kaur, there's potential to have an actual, interesting conversation about what makes something a poem, what makes something prose, what difference would it make if she changed this word or that word, does it make a difference that some of her poems are 'found' poems, etc. etc.

If someone says they love Twelfth Night, it's actually much harder to have a really good conversation. It's not impossible, but there's a lot that's already been said about Twelfth Night, and if the interviewee doesn't actually like Twelfth Night as much as they like Rupi Kaur, they won't be invested in defending what they like, or interested in speculating about what would be different if Shakespeare wrote in a different metre or whatever.

@LittleGwyneth

Totally fine not to like them. Not fair to suggest that they're shit because they're popular with young women & on Instagram. That's a big old helping of the patriarchy, telling us to dislike things because young women think that they're good.

I regularly defend Sylvia Plath and various contemporary women novelists from misogynistic dismissals of their value. But I do this because they are good.

You might not like Plath's Gothic atmospheres and harnessing of Holocaust imagery for her own internal psychic dramas in her work, or feel the suicidal myth gets in the way of the work, but her best work is complex and disturbing in its ideas and its stripping away the veneers of polite behaviour and female 'niceness', and also brilliantly inventive in its techniques.

I don't need the patriarchy to tell me that Rupi Kaur's poems are vacuous illustrated memes with line breaks.

YY, but @Muckish, she's saying we should dismiss Kaur because young women like her on instagram. That shouldn't be our reason for it. And there's a few posts that do shade into that territory, aren't there?