A Defence of Rupi Kaur
Are you sick of Rupi Kaur?
For those less familiar: this Indian Canadian poet has captured marmite-esque attention with a signature minimalist, broken style, assisted by illustrations.
She focuses on themes of relationships, loss, and femininity - gaining mass appeal.
And it all started with an Instagram account.
However, critics challenge her cliché truisms, digestible slices; simple language - many struggle to find artistic merit in this cultural goliath’s lowercase lines and lyrics.
But does that look too much at “the sun [,] and” not “her flowers”?
The distilled poetic notions in her radically free verse poems have garnered immense online attention over the years, becoming a hallmark of the “Instapoetry” genre; many have lauded her accessibility, honest depiction of trauma, and precedent for a diverse array of voices to be upheld.
This could be developed.
How can one perform conventional analysis on the broadly literal or clumsily metaphorical poems, possibly commercialized digital products?
Instead, some propose an unconventional and collaborative approach, partially inspired by Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (1967), which theorizes that the author’s intentions and biography are irrelevant to a text's meaning.
This approach would entail consideration of Kaur’s verse and accompanying sketches as prompts to synthesize one's own understanding, like a sketch for a future masterpiece.
This may take a few forms: extending the poem, jigsawing the contexts of its inspiration, reshaping the thematic contours of the poem - the premise is to find a sense of powerful harmony and empathy between poet and analyst.
As Celine proclaims in Before Sunrise (1995): “If there’s a God, it’s in the spaces between people”.
By numbing Barthes’ “intentional fallacy” of authorial intent, we can challenge ourselves to liberate the pathos of the poem from its so-called “faux profundity”, and experience the joyous creation of specificity, intellectual depth, and complexity: traits Kaur’s poetry often lacks.
Consequently, one fulfils the search for meaning by engaging one’s will to imagine environments, ideas and questions posed by the poems, and extend their potency even beyond the author’s intention.
So, arm yourself against increasingly short attention spans and the commodified mass consumption of bland media - with a willful optimism to wrench from poems all their worth, and then lots more.
Simon Cockling
Sources:
General discourse surrounding Kaur
“the sun and her flowers”, Kaur
Roland Bathes’ “Death of the Author” (trans. Howard)
“Before Sunrise”, dir. Richard Linklate
