Social Media poet Rupi Kaur whose first book about love, sex, rejection and relationships sold 1.4 million copies and the ‘Instapoet’ with 1.6 million followers on Instagram published her second collection in October this year.
A Sikh Punjabi who came to Canada at the age of four was taught by her mother to draw and paint when she could not speak English and she started writing poetry at the age of 17 as she found ‘painting to be a solitary from of art’, she said during an interview.
Her genre is also called micro poetry owing to their brevity and her verses are written in simple case and usually come with an illustration done by her. Some of her poems remind me of Haiku but this genre usually side steps Kaur’s explosive subject matters.
She says her writing style must have come from her native script Gurmukhi which is written in lower case. Her poems also do not have punctuation marks except periods ‘as I want to get rid of any distraction to the reader.’
As a child she used to write poems to her friends on their birthdays or messages to her middle school crushes and her foray into mass media began at a community open mike session where she read her poetry. Her first performance took place in 2009, in the basement of the Punjabi Community Health Centre in Malton, a suburb in Greater Toronto.
It was there she could read her poems about pain, suffering and coming of age, immediately sparking a rapport with a larger audience. A blog which she started on Tumbler in 2013 expanded into Instagram making her a celebrity poet with 1.6 million followers, with singer Ariana Grande as one of her fans.
She published her own collection of micro poetry, ‘milk and honey’, in 2014 which was picked up by a publisher. Twenty-five-year old Kaur’s collection of poetry dealing with themes of violence, abuse, love, sex and feminism, sold 400,000 copies on Amazon becoming a best seller and topped 1.4 million sales worldwide. It also reached number one on the New York Times bestsellers list for 52 consecutive weeks.
“When I had a book signing in San Fransisco for my second book, ‘the sun and her flowers’, the publishers expected only 300 people but when they opened the doors they were surprised to see the line stretching four blocks! I freaked out,” says Kaur adding ‘I thought what happened while I was away in India.’
After publishing her first book she was ‘under tremendous pressure’ and decided to take a break and write her second book in India. “The first book had no pressure but it was the opposite regarding the second one. Publishers were calling me regularly and I was so exhausted”. While spending time in India, she says, she had time to listen to her body and even harboured thoughts of quitting.
Where she lived in India had no internet and she was haunted by the fear ‘on a shallow level’ that she was not working hard enough and going to fall off amidst all the chaos. But she knew she was brimming over with poetry. So she came back locked herself in her room ‘to be myself’ and began to write her second book.
The book, ‘the sun and her flowers’, is divided into five chapters: ‘wilting’, ‘falling’, ‘rooting’, ‘rising’ and ‘blooming’. Like her previous one, this one is also an anthology consisting of poems that celebrates all the forms of love, with most of the poems accompanied by a picture. This book also explores a variety of themes ranging from loss, trauma, healing, femininity, migration and revolution.
Speaking about social media, she says the beauty of it all is you can open up a dialogue and discuss about experiences people bottle up within themselves afraid to talk about them openly.
She and her themes have been subjected to criticism on social media despite her adoring fandom.
Once Buzzfeed had a 3000-word article criticizing her “for blurring individual and collective trauma in her quest to depict the quintessential south Asian female experience”
Kaur has also been accused of plagiarism by another social media poet, Nayyirah Waheed, when her second book was out. There are many other poets like her on social media like Warsan Shire, Yrsa Daley-Ward and Amanda Lovelace to name a few, but they have all been eclipsed by Kaur’s worldwide adoration.
Once she was criticized for using her picture which shows her lying on the bed with her menstrual blood soaking her sweat pants and the sheet. Instagram banned the picture two times saying it was against their ethics. She fired back on Facebook saying: “Thank you Instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. You deleted my photo twice stating that it goes against community guidelines. I will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be ok with a small leak when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so many who are underage) are objectified, pornified, and treated less than human.” Instagram restored the image with an apology saying that it was a mistake.
How do her ultra conservative parents put up with all this? “It was difficult to have conversations about things like sex abuse with my dad and I was worried about what he thought about my super sexual pieces. But I knew they had been reading my poems on social media. I slipped my first book in front of him during dinner. He was okay with it and my parents understand my art and they leave me alone. They read the book but didn’t ask questions.” She says she knows her dad has spoken about her books with random banker friends, insurance clients and odd cashier at grocery stores.
Priya Khaira-Hanks, writing in The Independent says “Kaur is the most popular, and arguably the most marketable, of her cohort. She is pretty, stylish, unapologetically feminine, and earns a lot of money for writing that appeals to young women”. Indeed, Kaur’s particular brand of celebrity is more akin to that of a pop star like Grande than a traditional poet, she adds.
Kaur studied Rhetoric and Professional Writing at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. She and her family moved around many times before settling in Brampton, where she lived until recently. She currently lives in Toronto, Ontario.
The poetess says she draws inspiration from other people’s stories and experiences, as well as her own. Notable writers that she admires are Kahlil Gibran, Alice Walker, and Sharon Olds.
She is also influenced by Sikh scriptures in her writing and her life. – newstrails.com
