I’ve never been a fan of Rupi Kaur, but the cynic in me must bow down to her – ten years since the release of her debut work Milk and Honey, Kaur is still somehow a popular poet, having sold nearly 6 million copies of her work.
She has revamped the artform, made millions of angsty teens and neurotic adults discover the comfort of poetry, and has made people feel seen by speaking in layman’s terms.
But with the release of the 10th edition of Milk and Honey, which features contemporaneous diary entries and retrospective notes, I can’t help but wonder whether Kaur’s work, whilst monumental in its impact, has since lost its relevance.
Why go to a book of poetry to learn that you have value, when YouTuber Tam Kaur, who I regard as my internet big sister, can tell me all that (and in full sentences too)? Why do I need to turn to Rupi Kaur’s poetry, which at times seem to read as merely a jotted down thought as opposed to an actual poem, when I can go to LinkedIn to understand the importance of placing boundaries?
Because there’s simply so much available, Kaur’s grammarless, formless, accessible poetry which gave her fame now seems to simply lack pizzazz or any distinguishing factor. In other words, what made her accessible and popular now makes her poetry, dare I say it, boring.
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For the uninitiated, poetry generally has metre, grammar and punctuation. That is, unless you are a virtuoso like E.E.Cummings. Kaur however, begins interesting ideas and doesn’t develop them. Her poems are too short for meaningful exploration or experimentation. It’s the poetry equivalent of a TikTok video.
In other words, she leaves me hanging. She guides me by the hand towards promising ideas and then fails to follow through on them because she has no technique. If anything, I would expect Kaur, who has felt the bitter pain of so many romances, to know the dangers of a broken promise.
For example, page 41 reads, “the idea that we are / so capable of love / but still choose to be toxic…” I found myself asking “yes…and?” Other poems struck me as phrases that could be found on graphic T-Shirts, or worse still on a WhatsApp group chat. Take page 73 which reads “I am learning to love him / by loving myself.” Or how about the poem titled The Perfect Date which reads “nothing is safer than the sound of you reading to me.” Now don’t tell me you haven’t come across something like this in a Wattpad fanfic.
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But don’t get me wrong, some of these poems do still retain their “tattoo-able” quality despite all these years. Certainly, more girls my age need to be reminded to “fall / in love /with your solitude” or that “it takes grace to remain kind in cruel situations.” But should poetry simply be warm and fuzzy? Is it enough for poets nowadays to continually validate the reader, to whisper sweet nothings drenched in honey and to speak the language of mindset shifts which motivational YouTubers nowadays seem to be so fluent in?
Looking back at Milk and Honey ten years since its publication is a reminder that the poems were designed for the 2010-2014 Tumblr era, and much like the platform itself, have lost their relevance in a world overly saturated in content.
But perhaps the fact that Instagram poetry is a dying art simply means that someone new, whether young or old, needs to come in and make a change. And to Kaur, I can only offer a poem as solace:
I might have loved you back then / had I been more open-minded
– Your poetry just wasn’t my taste
