Rupi Kaur And Her Ability To Draw A Crowd Through Her Poems

As Watts notes, “The ability to draw a crowd, attract an audience or assemble a mob does not itself render a thing intrinsically good: witness Donald Trump. ” Can this be true for Rupi Kaur? She has the clear ability to draw a crowd and build up a substantial audience who seemingly worship the simple words she puts into poetry, yet she is still fighting a continuous battle of acceptance into the literary canon, which is dominated by white middle-class males.

“Literary texts which are assumed to be of special value are generally characterized by complexity of plot structure, language and ideas. ” Kaur’s work is one of complexity yet it is initially a battle to understand how complex a poem, consisting of a mere few lines, can be. Yet each poem is filled with contextual factors and despite the clear disregard for grammar and punctuation an array of other poetic methods are used throughout ‘The sun and her flowers’ in order to express her pain and suffering through every single poem within the collection; telling a story of hardship and resilience experience by Kaur from a young age. Despite Kaur’s battle towards acceptance many other esteemed poets such as William Carlos Williams’ write in a similar fashion to Kaur yet he is accepted into the literary canon with little regard to his simplistic poetry. His gender is the only thing that separates the two poets at first glance, leaving the literary canon to be one of the many corrupt institutions within society that ignore a phenomenal talent such as Kaur due to her being too diverse to fit into the conforms that the canon brings. Kaur’s poetry is that of simplicity to an uncultured eye yet her poems hold great meaning, her heritage is entangled in every poem within ‘The sun and her flowers’ and never fails to create a sense of familiarity even with the darkest of subjects which are touched upon in the collection.

Canonical literature is said to deal with ‘universal themes’, be complex in its style and have relevance across time. Kaurs work is no exception to this. ‘Universal’ themes such as patriarchal oppression, rape and other various forms of abuse are all touched upon in her poems in an unfiltered and brutally honest way. One example of this can be seen in ‘somewhere along the way…’, Kaur deliberately uses clear personification and hyperbolic language to mimic her personal feelings, “turmoil clotted my veins” which adds to the complexity of the poem. Upon closer inspection it can be seen as a narrative poem which means that the poem tells a story to the readers and allows them insight into her own inescapable suffering, which she has seemingly had to cope with for a majority of her life. (Is the poem in metered verse? ) The sexual abuse she experienced as a young girl come into play as her upbringing included abuse in many forms, she was taught from a young age various things about what she herself as a female had control over, her body not being one of them; “our bodies are not our property. we are told we must be conservative. a good south asian girl is quiet. does as she is told. sex does not belong to her. ” The topic of this poem in itself is a protest against the patriarchy that consumes the canon of english literature.

The seemingly accessible structures pose more of a threat to the patriarchal canon through gaining wider readership. Kaur faces an array of criticism for her work, the backlash she received when her initial collection of ‘milk and honey’ was overwhelming. The main critique that she received was the lack of grammar used within her poems. The poems often lack titles leaving the audience with no inclination of what they are about to read, there are seemingly no distinctive boundaries between each work allowing readers to read the entire collection as a whole or simply pick out poems which resonate with them personally; which ironically many of them do, despite the heavy reluctance of the canon to accept Kaur as an esteemed poet. This fluidity shown with the poems removes any impersonality and creates an organic poetry that refuses formalistic constraints.