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March 28, 2024, 08:23:54 PM

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Writer of the decade

Started by Urinal Cake, December 31, 2019, 05:12:23 AM

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Urinal Cake

https://newrepublic.com/article/155930/rupi-kaur-writer-decade

QuoteNevertheless, Rupi Kaur, a Canadian poet who is not yet 30 years old, is the writer of the decade.

Kaur's writing is not itself to my taste. She writes, in "the breaking":

did you think i was a city
big enough for a weekend getaway
i am the town surrounding it
the one you've never heard of
but always pass through

Beyond the affectation of the lowercase letters, I find the metaphor impenetrable—the speaker is ... a suburb? Further, I'm not an especial fan of the line drawings (they look like outsider art) that often accompany her poetry.

But Kaur's achievement as an artist is the extent to which her work embodies, formally, the technology that defines contemporary life: smartphones and the internet.
rupi kaur
i don't read
much poetry or books of poetry
I never heard of her
but saw her on my timeline
it's not for me
like drake another canadian

Twit 2


grassbath

Absolutely loathe her stuff. It comes up on social media and makes me grind my teeth.

Twit 2

She is the embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Most right-thinking folk, if they penned one of her "poems" would think, hang on this is bottom of the barrel sub-Hallmark tripe with all the insight and technical facility of a comatose cauliflower; I'd better flush this down the toilet where it belongs and hope the sewer doesn't reject it in disgust. But no, in her deluded narcissism she thinks she's a poet. Jesus. Tempest and McNish are only slightly better. In some ways it must be bliss being that ignorant of craft and tradition. Either way, they're all laughing all the way to the bank.

buttgammon

Hearteningly, I've heard a few undergrads talking about her and they agree with the consensus in this thread.

Urinal Cake

I am waiting for her to Terf out.

Famous Mortimer

She's apparently had some pretty strong claims of plagiarism made about her stuff too.

#7
I don't like Kaur or McNish, but I think it's only fair to say that they are operating in a wretched let-it-all-hang-out tradition which is over half a century old now.
The suburbs poem by Kaur above is quite a bit like the kind of sub-poetry Adrien Henri was writing in 1967
A year ago
You planted lilies in the valley of my mind
There were lilies at the bottom of my garden
And ferries at the bottom of my street


Nearly identical criticisms -simplistic- artless - childish- sentimental-trite- lazy - arrogant
and defences democratic- accessible - cool- heartfelt- new
were made about any number of Beat and post-Beat writers from the fifties onwards. One scathing article I have from the seventies, criticising the wretched but massive-selling Mersey Sound poetry book by Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough, and the London poetry scene centred around Michael Horowitz reads  almost exactly like the critical piece on Kaur Twit2 linked to above.
Rather than just being a product of the internet or a quirk of younger audiences tastes, this stuff has to be understood in this unfortunate context: this stuff is what generations of people have been educated and marketed into believing poetry is. In this context, I don't really think Kaur or Mcnish are deluded, exactly.

Maybe something else that has led to this dreadful situation is the absence in school English lessons(only going on my own experience here) about how to use rhyme and metre- I think haikus and sonnets were the only 'formal' lessons in poetry writing I ever had at school. Writing without any feel for metre inevitably seems to create this nothingy , navel-gazing work.

Also, I hate to see such rubbish being defended as 'accessible but maybe if intelligent poets retreat underground into uncompromising modernism then this kind of inane stuff inevitably wins.