Kaur’s work brings up a bevy of questions: Is her poetic engagement with trauma valid as a defense against any critique of her style? After all, honesty, vulnerability, and a willingness to tackle tough issues are valuable qualities in any writer, but content and form are ultimately separate, and one does not cancel out the other. But she’s also been accused of plagiarism and criticized for blurring individual and collective trauma in her quest to depict the quintessential South Asian female experience. Lauded by her readers as an authentic, intensely personal writer who isn’t afraid of baring her innermost trauma, she’s considered a much-needed voice of diversity in a literary scene that’s overwhelmingly white.
Their free verse poetry eschews difficult metaphors in favor of clear, plain language, and this accessibility is precisely what has garnered the new wave of " Instapoets" such a large and dedicated following.īut in terms of sheer numbers, Kaur remains the most popular - and the most controversial. Like her peers Nayyirah Waheed, Lang Leav, and, to a lesser extent, Warsan Shire (whose work is more complex and has received more critical acclaim), Kaur produces bite-size, accessible poems. Kaur’s explosive success is largely due to her origins as a social media star, and she is not alone. 3 by Simon & Schuster - each image racked up over 100,000 likes. In July, when Kaur uploaded a series of Instagram posts to announce her forthcoming second poetry collection - the sun and her flowers, to be released on Oct. Tickets for the London leg of her world tour in spring 2017 sold out in less than ten minutes. Her debut collection milk and honey, 200 sparse poems about love and loss, abuse and healing - first self-published in 2014 while Kaur was still in college - has sold over a million print copies and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 52 consecutive weeks.
Indeed, Kaur’s particular brand of celebrity is more akin to that of a pop star like Grande than a traditional poet. Rupi Kaur, however, can: The 24-year-old Indian-born Canadian counts the Dangerous Woman singer among her 1.5 million Instagram followers. Not many poets are able to say that Ariana Grande follows them on Instagram.
0 kommentar(er)
