Rupi Kaur is a Great Poet because we’re CreativelyDeadNarcissistDolts
Most of Kaur’s readers are like me - clueless about what poetry is - looking for instant gratification and validation from someone mildly famous who’ll say anything nice about them in pretty words & sketches without asking them to change anything about them and assuring that everything that’s wrong in their life is someone else’s fault because they’re beautiful - why - because they were born a woman.
I first consciously became aware of Ms. Kaur at a park during a book club gathering where I noticed a privileged human clutching a status-symbol phone in one hand and feminism-symbol - Rupi Kaur’s - Milk & Honey - in the other. It was a poetry meet. I was there as I’m fascinated with poetry. I’m fascinated as I don’t understand most of it. But, one doesn’t need to truly know how the perfect coffee tastes to tell what’s obviously terrible. It is beyond my scope to call Kaur’s poetry terrible, but I will challenge the wide-spread claims of it being honest, cathartic and actually poetry.
1. Is Rupi Kaur’s poetry honest
What is honesty - the definition of honesty is the most flexible in the millennial’s world. It’s been cheapened to bare bones. Honesty is the most difficult thing to do for humans. Why? Because honesty is brutal - it gets one killed or live in hardship. Most of the mortals openly accept the watered-down version of honesty as it makes them justify all the everyday falsifications they do.
In 2017, every* girl, whether she accepts it outright or not, wants to be beautiful - externally. No one joins Instagram to make the world aware of their visionary virtues. *barring the truly beautiful souls.
The fact that not every girl is beautiful is hard. Naturally, all those not so beautiful women - physically, intellectually, dynamically or ballsily - love Kaur as she is not only validating their mediocrity, she’s celebrating it.
Excellence isn't something anyone is born with. No one is born beautiful - Beautiful as a metaphor for intellect, virtuosity, character, and all things awesome. All those attributes aren't pre-fitted into humans. They're attained with tenacious hard work of decades. And they certainly aren’t reserved for one gender, even if that gender has had to perpetually suffer the bigotry of the other.
Michael Phelps wasn't born to win 23 Olympic Gold medals. He made it happen. Thank goodness, he didn't read deferential poetry telling him he's beautiful, perfect the way he is. He doesn’t need to change - the world must love him for who he is.
One of Kaur’s most popular quote - oh! my bad - poem is:
i m a museum of art
i m a museum of art
but you had your eyes shut
This is honesty to 13-year-olds who already think of themselves as the greatest gift to humanity because of Insta/Snapchat filters. Her twelve words are directly saying - ‘I’m the awesomest ever. You’re a bonehead not to notice.’
Here are two sets of twelve words I wrote in 27 seconds of insta-hardwork
Here are two sets of twelve words I wrote in 27 seconds of insta-hardwork
“Sometimes it's nice to be an asshole, but mostly it's pure beautiful.”
"It's wonderful to say every girl is beautiful. It's just not true."
If you don’t like my quotes [not poetry], listen to Eminem’s - Mockingbird. And if your head isn’t up your arse, you’ll see what honesty sounds and feels like.
If you don’t like my quotes [not poetry], listen to Eminem’s - Mockingbird. And if your head isn’t up your arse, you’ll see what honesty sounds and feels like.
2. Is Rupi Kaur a Poet [I don’t like using ? marks. Does that make me a visionary {there, I did it again}]
T.S. Eliot, the greatest poet, says poetry must be absolutely devoid of emotion & built entirely on feeling. Now, to most of us, that will be befuddling as we wouldn’t even know the distinction between emotion & feeling. The basic definition is - emotions are physical; feelings are in the mind.
Besides, Eliot says the poet must totally separate himself from the poetry - including all his experiences & personality [that’s crazy talk, El] and that the poet must not only be conscious of the living, but also of the dead.
Kaur’s writing is a potpourri of blazing emotion & feeling - she writes through her experiences & reflects her personality and is writing for her generation or people with the similar thought process. If Eliot read her words, he may have blurted ‘phoneytry’
I geddit, it’s absurd of me to take her to the cleaners because she doesn’t follow a purist’s standards. But, it won’t ridiculous if I pitched her against the soft-heart Insta-Tumblr standards.
Here comes - Caitlyn Siehl
“Do not fall in love with people like me.
I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.
I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.”
“When the boys come with the intention of hurting you,
my advice will always stay the same, my darling:
Give 'em hell.”
“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.”
That is visceral writing with casings & punctuations. But, again that is my opinion. But, what explains that Siehl has a non-existent Insta following & Kaur has 1.6 million.
Kaur is to poetry what Bieber is to singing - an inevitable anomaly.
3. Is Kaur bringing catharsis
Catharsis is the word that she & her ardent fans say a lot. How her writings have brought a change in people’s lives.
Temporary upliftment isn’t change. Most people feel good after smoking hash, but that feeling is transitory.
Most of her followers are privileged, entitled people. In India, young girls, who come from money, love Kaur, not the ones living in real Punjab. Any woman who truly goes through real shit without a shred of Hope isn't English-educated to comprehend her ostensibly "cathartic poetry.”
Kailash Satyarthi, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been working as a children’s rights activist from the past 37 years and has liberated over 83,000 child laborers in 144 countries since 1980. That is real change without a single Insta follower.
Inspirational writing isn't what tells you're perfect the way you're. That's the millennial self-love trash. Inspirational writing tells you - You can be better. You gotta be better. It kicks you off your comfort zone. It makes you evolve because it isn't sycophantic, it's provocative.
Dropping punctuations & varied casings isn’t creative - it’s a marketing gimmick. Kaur writes short derivative polished quotations [aka poetry] for Generation Z, who inherently have chronic ADD & self-love. They unanimously love her aesthetically collective victimisation invective.
She'll be truer when she questions her readers, challenges them instead of pronouncing them all courageous, intellectual, beautiful by birth. That too specifically because they're women.
I will end my diatribe with my all-time favorite poem by Rupi Kaur
“the world gives you so much pain, and here you are making gold out of it.”
“the world gives you so much pain, and here you are making gold out of it.”
Fuck, you’re
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