When I was thirteen, I was completely enamored with Rupi Kaur’s poetry. I saw her debut collection, Milk and Honey, take Booktube and Bookstagram by storm, and I wanted to participate in the conversation. So, I read Milk and Honey expecting to love it. And I did love it! Kaur wrote poems about femininity, bodies, trauma, and relationships, all of the things a teenage girl wants and needs to read about. She used simplistic language and short lines, making the medium of poetry that had always felt so beyond my reach feel real, feel lived in. One of my favorite poems of Kaur’s was only two lines long: “and here you are living/ despite it all”. I felt truly seen by Kaur at that point in my life, and I continued to defend her work when she began to receive criticism online.
However, I am now a third-year English and Creative Writing student, and I have developed a much deeper relationship to traditional poetry and poetic craft than I had when I was thirteen. When I look back at Kaur’s work at this point in my degree and literary journey, it doesn’t feel the same. The lines that’d once read as emotional gut-punches now feel gimmicky and uninspired than anything else. So, is Kaur’s work truly less valuable and meaningful than I’d thought, or does academia condition us to dismiss simplistic and accessible creative writing to perpetuate the myth that exclusivity and complexity automatically indicate goodness?
Let’s take a look at one of Kaur’s most heavily criticized poems. The poem reads, “don’t mistake/ salt for sugar/ if he wants to/ be with you/ he will/ it’s that simple”. Yes, that is the entire poem. And I don’t say that because I think short-form poetry is invalid; I say that because this poem is absolutely void of any effectively-wielded poetic qualities and I found myself desperately waiting for the next line to contain something of substance. Kaur’s work here truly reads like a sentence from a work of prose randomly broken up into lines of poetry. Not all of Kaur’s work is like this; a few of her poems, especially the ones that deal with the female body and feminine sexuality, contain far more depth. However, the majority of her work reads just the way this poem does: an attempt at bringing abstract ideas closer to reality that falls flat because of its dull, half-baked language and unnuanced themes.
I do not consider myself an authority on poetry, nor do I think there is any definitive way to assess a poem’s “goodness”. There are plenty of modern poets who do the work of making poetry feel truer to contemporary lived experiences, but Rupi Kaur is, in my opinion, not one of them. I applaud Kaur for playing a part in the revitalization of poetry in the public consciousness, but I cannot stay silent on her derivative, tired content and execution. Poetry should 100% be more accessible, but we cannot pursue accessibility to the detriment of quality.