On Rupi Kaur, and the State Of Poetry Today

Rupi Kaur has had an undeniable effect on what people call poetry. Her most famous book is ‘Milk and Honey’, though it is not the most popular now (after eleven years that would be a surprise) it still sells very well. One of her side effects is a tonne of copycats who never before her had done poetry of this form. Some popular ones at the moment are ‘The Tears That Taught Me’ by Morgan Richard Olivier, and ‘save me an orange’ by Hayley Grace, but there are countless other ones that came and went over the years. The copycats and Kaur herself are easily identified by their cover art and typography. The cover cannot be but a mute backdrop colour with some decorative flora or fauna, looking much like a cheap bedsheet. Inside, the text is sparse, with a decorative element here or there, often borrowing the lack of capitals or punctuation of Kaur.

There is no doubt; at release of Milk and Honey, Kaur became the mother of a new poetic form. It’s distinguishing name is Instagram poetry, because the readers (mostly middle aged women) love to post pictures of their books, splayed on their sterile coffee table. This name also serves as an accurate description of the form itself, being short and superficial with a heavy air of faux-profoundness. Really, I made a mistake to call this a poetic form; my actual contention is that these works are not even poetry to begin with.

Excerpts

Rupi Kaur; from Milk and Honey

Randomly selected from my copy, this is typical of her work, albeit longer than usual.

Morgan Richard Olivier; from The Tears That Taught Me.

A random page found in an image search engine.

Hayley Grace; from save me an orange.

Taken from the book’s Amazon description.

Poetic education of the masses.

I’m an Australian, I don’t speak for everybody, but I’m sure my experience isn’t unlike other Western countries. Our curriculum has been in decline for decades. I don’t mean anything of politics or scandalous news or arguments. My interest in pedagogy lead me into personal investigations of the old curriculum, reading it’s textbooks and yearbooks, and had many conversations with long-career teachers, who invariably believe our curriculum has been reduced from what it was. In the USA, there are the famous cases of ‘no child left behind’, and recently the recognition that the new approach to reading was a failure. So, there are legitimate grounds for the idea that education, within Australia and seemingly elsewhere in the world, has been in decline over the last few decades.

Of course, there is also the recent push for graduates to enter STEM, which is directed even at the younger children now. Curriculum across the primary and junior high has been carved to make space for new STEM education, which may be more like propaganda than a legitimate education since it’s purpose could only be to manufacture interest in STEM. It seems there have been many cases of schools being given generous grants to build new STEM facilities, though they have existing facilities that could rather be improved, but for some reason this does not happen instead. The senior STEM classes are considered the only legitimate exams if you want to go to university, and every other class is assumed to be ‘easier’ or for ‘dumb people’. The ultimate effect is our mandatory education is already and is becoming more biased towards STEM; naturally, they have shafted every other “unimportant” subject such as the humanities and arts for this.

So we know that everything except STEM or English is mangled, and obviously poetry has suffered as the most “useless” of all the subjects. The peak of poetic form a regular student may encounter may be the limerick or the acrostic poem. Poetry is totally ignored in later years of education because it is not assessable in final year exams, which are for students and teachers alike, the ultimate measure of purpose in education. Even a student who takes the senior Literature class, as I did, will be miseducated. They will learn to identify themes and wield critical theory — colonial, feminist, and Marxist viewpoints, though lacking any real understanding of these at that, but merely using a student’s existing notions, which for a average sixteen year old would be in it’s entirety as basic as ‘colonialism is European and bad’ and ‘Marxism is rich people versus poor people’ — and the only attention given to technical aspects are simple ideas like assonance and alliteration. The student learns only what is necessary to feign analysis of poetry that will look good enough to an examiner who is speedily marking essays by rubric. And that is the best education in poetry a high school student may receive.

It is easy to see why people have no taste for poetry if this is their education. Even a willing student will not be taught anything to help them enjoy poetry; they learn instead to treat it like a medical specimen, insensitively examining and picking at it, with the amateurish hand of a barber-surgeon on his first day. There are others, such as the readers of Kaur, or the young people who try write poetry to express themselves, which I will discuss later. Then there are the vast majority of people, who simply despise poetry and poets because poetry is too old and too hard to understand. All of these people are lacking in the education that’s necessary to enjoy poetry. It’s the same as music, you cannot listen to a fugue and appreciate it so thoroughly without a musical education. This is why why schools, even the poor schools of small Soviet towns, had classes for musical appreciation — and we know historically, learning about poetry was vital in any good education too. A person untrained in the visual arts (one such as myself) will look at a painting and see only what it depicts. The lover of art will see so much more, understanding the decision made in it, the choices behind it’s composition and it’s selection of colour and tone, all of which enhances the glory of the work in his eye. Poetry is the same, as any art.

“It’s just free verse.”

Free verse is the reigning champion of contemporary poetry, mostly because people find it easiest to write something resembling free verse. As these things turn out, it is not so for the true poet; you abstain from regular forms and structures, such as line length and rhyming schemes, and are left alone to consider the real effect of what you are writing. It is similar to the impressionist painter, who is free of the expectations of realism, but faces new difficulties having less guiding principles and no concrete heuristic to evaluate the piece. When done well, free verse poetry and impressionist painting can be exceedingly beautiful. Personally, I’ve read many poets of English history, but my absolute favourite is the free-verse modernist T.S Eliot.

I hold that Kaur’s work only resembles free verse poetry, but is not truly. It is true that it lacks normal poetic structures and forms; the crucial element that is missing, is the use of the essential aesthetic elements of poetry, which make a piece poetic. In the same way, one could say that the Oxford Dictionary appears like free verse poetry; true, that it lacks normal poetic structure and form, but there is nothing recognizably poetic in it either.

I’ve read enough of her poetry, and failed to observe any intentional use of aesthetic elements, except for a trivial thing here and there. For example, in the excerpt above, the regular repetition of ‘i’. This is not exceedingly interesting alone; Plath does this in her Soliloquy Of The Solipsist, but with many more elements that altogether create the solipsistic theme, and with much more interesting imagery; Kaur is opposed to imagery, preferring to speak at us in a plain white room. She is opposed to everything truly poetic, and the same is true of those even worse hacks who imitate her. Olivier’s piece follows a normal pattern of English metre, though the final line feels stiff. Take note, in Grace’s piece, of the third and fourth lines and how bad they are. If you read it aloud, the words will trip all over each other and sound confused and strange — for poetry is not just words on a page, but must be read aloud to actually observe the aesthetic qualities of a piece. The rhyme also, draws your attention, though not for any particular reason, and you are left wondering why.

The elements of poetry I speak of have been known and respected by every poet, from the Ancient Greeks to the modernists. They are so fundamental to poetry that they define what makes a work poetic or not. Kaur and her copycats created this form that rejects those elements, and replace them with their own superficial aesthetics that appeal to the reader in non-poetic ways, such as the typography and the bare message of a piece. “It must be,” I hear someone say, “that this is because their work is so original that it breaks the old rules of poetry.” Such a response is ignorant as to the difference between the real principles of poetry, derived from how the language of the writer works, and the structures we invent such as the sonnet and haiku, or rhyme schemes like the ABAB and ABBA. A poem is not a poem because it merely tries to fit a poetic form, but because it uses poetic elements with artistic consideration. If you do not do that one thing, you have not tried to write a poem, and have not written a poem. Thus, my great contention is that these writers fail to even write poetry.

“She’s just expressing herself.”

Many people have the impression that poetry is all about expressing yourself, rooted in the contemporary idea of the artist in general. It is especially so in music. With so few people interested in poetry in a serious capacity, there is nobody to go against the majority and their trifling interest, who take this goal to heart. Look at Wattpad and it’s massive collection of juvenalia centered on miserable and hormonal existence.

This doesn’t at all track with poetry of history though. Homer’s Iliad; Wordsworth’s The Idiot Boy; Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; even Sylvia Plath, who was more personal than most, was not strictly so. Since when was it the business of the artist to expose himself? The old Christian view of art was to glorify God or give moral instruction; the forthcoming secular view was still to glorify aspects of humanity, to express ideas and concepts. The best motivations in art do not face inward, but actually face outward, and have noble and unselfish aims; this is the actual root of the sense an artist has that one must create, so to serve something greater than oneself. Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue, though today we understand the conditions of life that influenced this piece, was not written purposefully to express those feelings; as music is like a language, it is the same as when a miserable person speaks of miserable things and with gloomy words and tone. Self-expression may happen in art, but if it is the primary goal, then the art will be ignoble and self-indulgent. How can one create transcendant work if they are self-centered?

Besides, this style of poetry, which is so short, shallow, and narrowly focused on an idea, without allusion or interest, can only succeed in evoking feeling in the reader if they supply it themselves. Why else do these works focus so much on mundane plights of human relations? Her readership of middle aged women full of romantic frustrations are quite ready to impress their feelings on the text, on behalf of Kaur. Each poem’s idea is painfully obvious and cannot be read in any other way, and has nothing else to engage or delight the reader, that they feel like they must feel. Is she really expressing herself in these poems then? They are too sentimental and obvious to feel like an expression that one would be proud of, but I cannot speak for Kaur at any rate, but the question remains in my mind, though I may never know the answer.

“Art is subjective.”

This idea is the refuge of any challenge against an artist. Of course, it is a gross oversimplification usually wielded by people who don’t really know or care about art. In the foundations of all art, there are objectively existing ideas and concepts tied up in the medium. The tonality of the oboe versus the flute; the sparseness and denseness, the leaps and steps, of a passage of notes; the harmonic tensions of chords that every trained musician understands and is aware of, that can be understood with mathematical precision. Such are some of the inextractable elements of music that can produce certain musical effects. Poetry has the same things, based on features of the spoken language the poem is written in. In English, these are things such as stress patterns (iambs, trochees, dactyls and spondees), the rhythm your speech follows for different sequences of consonants, how grammar affects the power of imagery. The effects they have are certain, they are objective; these are some fundamental effects that must guide all poetry, even free verse, if it’s to achieve anything.

Art is partially objective and subjective at the very least. I’d say the objective was over-emphasized historically, but the popular beliefs of today over-emphasize the subjective instead. Isn’t truth one of the grand pursuits of art? and truth is that which is truly objective? If art were wholly subjective, there would be no great works that stand forever; though the Iliad and the Odyssey were made in a culture two and half thousand years foreign in time and place, they are still read and enjoyed today, and I think that can only happen because he created something so objectively good, that it withstood the changing tastes of time up to today, and still count his work as among the greatest works of literature, just as the ancient people did.

It should be understood that this point is indiscriminately abused just to end arguments or discussion on artistic merit, and this is a quite harmful effect.

What is there to do?

For all my complaint, one should wonder for what do I say all this? do I believe this is a problem that should be solved?

I’ve said before, I believe we are in a dark age of poetry. In many accounts was the poet elevated by all men, spoken of as a being higher than anyone else. What a great fall he had to where he stands now, a misunderstood and despised oddity who cares for strange inpenetrable text.

I see two main streams of poetry. We have the historical poetry, such as Byron, Wordsworth, Virgil, Plath; all rightfully beloved, but their work is static and unchanging. We cannot depend on academia, for it’s loyalties are not with the arts, and even the sections for art today have become strange, bewildering, and artifical. I doubt any meaningful literary work should come from out their stale walls. There is the other stream of current practice, which I have talked about. Kaur and her Kronies, the junk you see on Wattpad that is barely poetry, and also the highly political slam poetry, which may be a genuine poetic practice in a sense, but I dislike it for it’s topical nature and ugliness. I’m aware of things like the & magazine, but I wouldn’t consider 4chan’s /lit/ magazine to be mainstream at all.

There is nothing to do about the popularity of such awful things in the masses. This is not something we can solve, so we should throw away our concerns. Let’s focus on making our own space for poetry that goes against these main streams, holding fast to our beliefs, and holding constructive and positive views. We should:

• Continue to write poetry to the standard we hold true.
• Share our poetry freely — not hidden in your Amazon anthology nobody wants to buy — everywhere across the net.
• Read the poets of the past, study them and learn from them.
• Read of poetic theory and practice, questioning and investigating the rules so we may understand and bend them, so to ensure our poetry resonates in contemporary English. Make new choices, make mistakes, and push poetry ever forward.
• Maintain a genuine love for poetry, and endeavour to share and inspire this love in others.
• Use poetry, not to vent misery or claw at the world or indulge yourself, but to inspire divine feelings and understanding in other people. Have lofty aims worthy of the poet’s historic exaltation.

Let’s not kid ourselves, being a poet in the modern age sucks in a way it never did before. It’s heavily discouraging, you want to hide it from other people who don’t understand it, and for this reason poetry is one of the most isolating arts, though it should be the most pro-social and human. Spending all your time conversing with dead people in books is not what we should be doing; we should be sharing and connecting. Nevertheless, press on. Poetry may be in a dark period, but it will never be killed, and we can keep it alive by our own work.