5 Reasons Rupi Kaur Is the Poet of Our Times

Of course, poetry is subjective, and your appreciation (or lack thereof) for it changes as you change. Poems that didn’t resonate when read in school creep up on you in middle age, and poets that blew your mind when you were 20 may not seem as profound by age 50. But Kaur is the real deal, and as close as we’ve come to a poetry superstar in a long, long time. As her second collection, the marvelous The Sun and Her Flowers, continues to gather her new admirers, we offer these reasons why.
Her Grasp of Medium
We’re living in the 21st century, a world in which tiny computers live in every pocket. People are increasing cutting cords and consuming media on their phones instead of their televisions. Just 25, Kaur understands that even if print books are making a comeback, her generation lives on social media, and that has an effect on how they read and understand. Her poetry reflects this; it’s often said she really publishes on her Instagram account, which is where much of her work appears, long before it’s collected. Her poems are crafted for the platform—short, with artful line breaks that are visually appealing (the impact of the “shape” of a poem has long been misunderstood, but poets from T.S. Eliot to Lewis Carroll believed what a poem looks on the page matters). They are usually accompanied by her warm, hand-drawn illustrations. If you were to design a bionic poet for the social media age, it would be Rupi Kaur.
She Makes It Look Easy
That style of short, eccentrically-formatted poems is easy to mock. Like the folks who see a Jackson Pollack painting and say their kid could paint it, people see a poem like this and think anyone could do it:
the idea that we are
so capable of love
but still choose
to be toxic
But the style is much more controlled and subtle than it first appears. Kaur’s line breaks are diamond-sharp, and her lack of capital letters and limited use of punctuation (the period is the only mark she uses) is a nod towards her heritage; both features of Punjabi, the language of her birthplace. If you dismiss Kaur’s work as simplistic, you’re not paying attention.
Her Work Fights Chauvinism
Criticism of Kaur often has a decidedly unsavory chauvinistic edge. A large proportion of her work deals with issues women encounter daily, but are often invisible to men; as her audience is heavily female, there’s a tendency by male culture hawks to dismiss it as silly or shallow. It’s a sadly common idea—that anything that appeals to women must, of course, be inferior (a fact romance readers know well). That much of Kaur’s work deals with abuse and oppression by men makes it feel even more of the moment in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp.
There’s a Narrative
Neophytes often boggle at the abstract nature of poetry—its lack of a story or a character to become involved with.
Kaur, remarkably, constructs a narrative with her poems, despite the fact that they initially appear one-by-one on her social media platforms. Milk and Honey is divided into four sections: the hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing. Reading from the beginning to the end tells the story of a relationship, with Kaur as the main character, and it’s a powerful story arc that’s easy to invest in emotionally. It turns out Kaur is a storyteller—and a very good one.
She’s Not Processed
Art in the modern age is often overly processed and commercialized. Singers are auto-tuned to perfection. Writers are more conscious and savvy about reaching a viable market than ever. Kaur charms with an aesthetic that seems to be precisely the opposite, a refreshing quality that is hopefully the beginning of a new trend. Her work pops up on social media with an immediacy that feels urgent, and her artwork has an off-the-cuff feel that reminds you of quick doodles in the margins of a book. There’s an air of honesty about it all, an emotional impact resulting from truth rather than careful attention to production values.
Poetry is often thought of as impenetrable, but Rupi Kaur has made it imminently accessible, and in doing so, she has revolutionized an ancient art form for today.