Meditations on Rupi Kaur's Critics

Is this the beginning of a new movement in verse, or the start of a vicious poetry war? At The Guardian, Priya Khaira-Hanks observes a few of poet Rupi Kaur's critics, on the eve of the appearance of her second collection of poetry. "Her debut collection, Milk and Honey, has sold 1.4m copies – so far – and she has 1.6 million followers on Instagram. But success often comes with a backlash, and for every ardent fan, there is a sneering keyboard critic," Khaira-Hanks writes. From there: 

Her trademark fragmented free verse makes her easy prey for online sceptics. Their mimicry is often witty, and close enough to Kaur’s formula to sting: examples include “I wanted / Chick-fil-a / but / you / were / a Sunday morning” and “I understand / why guacamole is / extra / it is because / you / were never / enough.”

Even if you like her writing, these little jabs at her plaintive voice are spot on: one of Kaur’s actual poems muses “If you are not enough for yourself / you will never be enough / for someone else” and, while that gained 175,000 likes on Instagram, it has the air of the slurred advice you might overhear at the back of a Wetherspoons.

Kaur treads a fine line between accessibility and over-simplicity, and often stumbles into the latter. But does she deserve a 3,000-word article on Buzzfeedcriticising her “for blurring individual and collective trauma in her quest to depict the quintessential south Asian female experience”? 

There have also been plagiarism claims, most notably when her second collection, The Sun and Her Flowers, was announced. Nayyirah Waheed, another young poet who posts work on social media, had accused Kaur of ignoring her messages about the similarities between their work. These claims aside, the truth is that both writers have hit upon a winning formula: rupturing short confessional pieces with erratic line breaks to share hard-won truths.

Read more at The Guardian.