A young Punjabi woman crosses the stage on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show. She is pretty: long obsidian hair, almond eyes, a pant suit and black heels, her fingers striped in gold rings. She seems comfortable in front of a crowd — as she crosses the stage, she waves and smiles casually — but she’s clearly nervous too. She’s never been on Fallon before. 

“I’m so happy that you’re here,” Jimmy gushes, once she sits. 

“You know,” the young woman begins, stuttering slightly, “I thought I had to become, like, a pop star, or like, an actress, to get here, but somehow Poetry is getting me…”

She trails off, blushing, but Jimmy rescues her:

“Poetry is the knew Pop, man!”

And the audience roars. 

But behind the roar, if you listen closely, if you listen beyond and through the TV screen, you might hear the distant crashes and slams of Poetry professors, MFA students, and the Literati everywhere throwing their television remotes in frustration at the wall. And even farther away, if you listen even harder, you might hear a faint rustling sound, like dry leaves, as Yeats, Dickinson, and Shakespeare all turn over in their graves. 

Rupi Kaur is resurrecting Poetry. 

But Poetry, capital “P,” does not approve. 

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Fifteen years ago, Poetry was in the ICU. Something like heart failure. 

In 2004, both Harpers Collins and Knopf told Publishers Weekly that poetry was a losing market. In the following four-year-span, 2004 to 2007, poetry books in the U.S. sold only 12M copies total, roughly what Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold its first 24 hours. By 2012, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that only 6.7% of Americans had read a poem within the last year, making Poetry about half as popular as Knitting (12%) and second only to Opera (2%) for the prize of Least Popular Art Form. By 2013, U.S. poetry sales had reached a statistical all-time low. 

But then came Rupi Kaur. In 2015 Rupi sold nearly one million copies of her first collection, milk and honey, within its first year of publication, landing at #1 on The New York Times bestsellers list. Shortly after, Kaur’s the sun and her flowers debuted at #2 on Amazon’s bestsellers list and sold two million copies in its first three months, breaking all records and rounding out 2017 as the then-best year for poetry sales ever. Poetry did an about-face. Miracle cure. The Bookseller proclaimed that the poetry market was “booming.” The Guardian announced poetry was experiencing a “renaissance.” Statistics reported a 21% compound annual growth rate in U.S. poetry sales from 2013 to 2017. And although almost half of all of poetry books sold in those years were Rupi Kaur’s, the non-Rupi poetry market experienced an increase in sales too. Publishers Weekly called it “the Rupi effect.” A rising tide lifts all poets. For the first time in maybe ever (?), poetry made money, privy now to a fresh, spend-ready audience primed by Rupi Kaur.

But the puzzling bit about Rupi’s ascension is that the general critical consensus from the Poetry world, capital “P” — the Literati, the remote-throwers (those, one could argue, who stand to benefit most from the Rupi Effect) — is that Rupi’s work is “not real poetry,” as The New York Times paraphrases. Esteemed poetess Rebecca Watts raised hell in PN Review, calling Rupi Kaur’s poetry “artless” and characterized by an “open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft.” Poetry’s trio of legitimizers — The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The American Poetry Review — have never published her; neither can you find a single Rupi Kaur poem in any other reputable literary journal or magazine. The New Republic named her “Writer of the Decade,” but Poetry’s wiki, The Poetry Foundation, has yet to award Rupi a profile page. Even supporters like The Guardian admit Kaur’s poems effuse “over-simplicity” and an “air of the slurred advice you might overhear at the back of a Witherspoons.” And I think everyone — even her most ardent defenders — would agree that comparing a poem of Rupi’s to, say, one of Yeats’, is like holding a stick figure next to a Rembrandt portrait. But maybe that’s the point — after all, Rupi’s poems are always accompanied by just that: stick-figure drawings. Craft? Artistry? No. According to Rupi, her poetry is about something else. 

Whether she’s sincere or a genius marketer or both, Rupi has blamed her literary exclusion on identity politics. “I don’t fit into the age, race, or class of a bestselling poet,” she told The Guardian. “I used to submit my writing to anthologies and magazines when I was a student — but I knew I was never going to be picked up.” On her website, Rupi describes her work as a means to “challenge that narrative” of “thousands of years of shame and repression, from the community and colonizer after colonizer.” And Kaur’s supporters are happy to reinforce her story. Buzzfeed praised Rupi as “an icon of diversity against hostile gatekeepers of literary prestige” and “a much needed voice of diversity in a literary scene that’s overwhelmingly white.” The 2017 Women’s March bore signs emblazoned with Rupi’s words. 

As for the allegations that her work is too banal to be considered “real poetry,” Rupi calls her lack of artisan her “authentic” voice. Her writing is her “heart on paper,” her “most honest act of living.” Her fans call her an “authentic writer” “who produces art free of artifice.” Simplicity is essential to her brand. “It’s like a peach,” Rupi told Rolling Stone, “you have to remove everything and get to the pit of it.”

(…Apparently missing the obvious fallacy in her metaphor, which is, of course, that nobody eats the pit.)

But in reality both sides are wrong — the Literati, who believe Rupi’s work is not literary, and Rupi, who believes her literary exclusion has to do with her demographic. Rupi’s poetry actually is very canonical and avant-garde and noteworthy and should be considered “real poetry;” at the same time, she is not being excluded for her race or gender, but for her very real lack of artistry and craft.

I know that seems contradictory. 

It will make sense in a moment.

It all has to do with this movement called “postmodernism” and certain prophecies made by our last great card-carrying literary genius, David Foster Wallace. 

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For the past 50+ years U.S. culture has gone catatonic under a strange enchantment, one that makes our art acutely involuted, absurd, and self-referential, steeped in iconoclasm, sardonic fatigue, and most of all, rebellious irony. It is this enchantment that allows Ferris Bueller to speak ironically to the camera and Carly Simon to sing “you’re so vain / I bet you think this song is about you,” the enchantment that has Family Guy skipping scenes from pop reference to pop reference in nonsensical gusto, the enchantment that leaves laymen poetry readers and victims at poetry readings asking “What the hell was that? What did that mean?” Some people love the postmodernist enchantment; others despise it. At its best it’s given us Chappelle’s Show and Monty Python, at its worst, I can’t say. Remember that guy in art school who would staple like a shoelace to a ketchup bottle, or whatever, and present it to the class with a profound title like “American Phantasmagoria”? Postmodernism is that. 

The postmodernist writer expresses himself by rebelling against all of those traditional qualities of literature the classicists held sacred, like sentimentality, sincerity, truth, artistry, craft — plot, structure, cohesion, sense-making, grammar, syntax, punctuation — and the once-considered-self-evident idea that writing is an act of communication between author and reader. As critic Tony Cliff describes it, Postmodernism is “the theory of rejecting theories.” I’ll give you two examples of Postmodernist Poetry. The first is an excerpt from My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe (recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and two American Book Awards), which I stole from critic Albert Gelpi’s essay “The Genealogy of Postmodernism”: 

Approach to the Castle of Perilous
knight tested by the illusion 
of nothingness     Estray
into my own Exile 
(a dome to hive) Majestical
Soul is a god  and sun is a God 
on the horizon       (Principle
vision)   out of an ocean 
Soul is the maker of sun She
is dressed as a man
Beholder in silence and in utter 
forgetfulness 

Yikes. And here is “The Mechanical Bride” by Jerome Rothenberg, also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a three-time winner of the American Book Award. This one I found on my own. 

The Mechanical Bride

no longer is mechanical, today
not nor tomorrow
they prop her under the tunnel
that bears her name
sad bride
thy tiny flanges swell & fall
the man who buys thy roadster
hauls thee to a dance
mechanical & beaming
like a brain machine
the pope of DADA mounts thee
sucks thy pipes
later will pop his rivets on
thy rubber cushions

It is hard to make sense of either without extreme interpretive ardor, but I bet both of these nearly nonsensical poems garnered their share of P.H.D. theses and glowing critiques. I’m pretty certain the second one, Rothenberg's, concludes with Duchamp ejaculating on a motorcycle. If you’re anything like me, this type of writing you just don’t “get.”

So what impeti prodded postmodern artists to stoop to this level of irreverence? A number of things. As David Foster Wallace describes it, postmodernism “clearly evolved as an intellectual expression of the rebellious youth culture of the 60s and 70s” and was inexorable to the advent of cable television. Trends in philosophy played a central role as well — specifically the work of Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) — and are worth plundering further, though I’ll be brief:

Roland Barthes’ big contribution to critical theory was his 1967 essay “La mort de l’auteur” — The Death of the Author — which argued that texts should be read independently from their authors. This severed that almost self-evident agreement that books act as communications from writer to reader. Then Jacques Derrida caught the alley-oop from Barthes and dunked, claiming that any single person’s interpretation of a text was entirely subjective, and therefore, any text — like the Bible, for example — is bound to fruit an infinite number of interpretations and meanings. Therefore, texts a priori cannot contain “meaning” or objective truths, because “meaning” is an invention of the reader, a projection.

Now, if you combine Barthes and Derrida, add a sprinkle of post-war cynicism, a dash of cable television, and bake it all in an oven of 80s hairspray and post-Reagan politics, you get Postmodernist Literature and poems like those above. If texts are no longer communications between author and reader, and if “meaning” has been proven subjective, then what’s left? Chaos. Rebellion. Total lack of coherence. Heavy artistic experimentation. Art without “meaning.” Books exploring the fact that they are books. Poems about the fact that they are poems. Attempts to be profound by eschewing everything profound. Irony and self-referential hipness. Because nothing matters anymore. They dropped two nukes on Japan, for christ’s sake. The flower children failed. Reagan won. The TV shaped our eyeballs into pixelated squares. Who cares? Yee-haw. 

I think this is why Poetry grew so immensely unpopular in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. Poets forgot that the reason we all read poetry is really, truly, to encounter “meaning.” In killing the author, they killed the reader. In 2013, when The Washington Post claimed “poetry [was] going extinct,” they had it confused: poetry wasn’t going extinct on its own. Rather, poets were killing poetry, one insouciant, overly-complex poem at a time. 

The problem with postmodernism is that if it is “the theory of rejecting theories” and is so steeped in irony and cynicism that nothing “matters” and nothing is sincere, then how can we, as a culture, hope to move past it? In David Foster Wallace’s words, “if rulelessness becomes the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent.” Which is to say, what movement can we possibly propose now that postmodernist logic won’t ridicule and deconstruct into oblivion? Who will be the first post-postmodernist, and what will that mean? 

In 1990 Wallace published his seminal essay about postmodernism, “E Unibus Pluram.” The essay was a huge hit in the literary scene. It was part of our required reading in my English degree. The final paragraph of that essay prophesied a new generation of literary rebels which have since been called the “New Sincerity.” Here’s the important bit:

“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels… who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of over credulity.”

Sound at all like Rupi?

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But wait, 1) How is Rupi wrong about her claim of demographic exclusion? And, 2) How might Rupi represent Wallace’s “New Sincerity” and legitimize herself in the literary canon? 

The first question is easy. Anyone worth their salt in Poetry circles will tell you that of all the literary channels — fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry — poetry is hands-down the most demographically inclusive branch. Just take a look at the list of U.S. poet laureates from the last few decades — you will see faces of every gender, sexuality, race, and class. Rupi is late to her argument by about 30 years; as The Atlantic notes, Poetry’s inclusion of racial and gender diversity went mainstream in 1993, when Rita Dove, African American and female, became poet laureate. The same year, diaspora poet Garret Hongo noted that “we [diverse poets] even serve on foundation and [National Endowment for the Arts] panels, sit on national awards juries, teach in and direct creative writing programs, and edit literary magazines.” Our current poet laureate is Joy Harjo, a Native American woman. Sorry Rupi, but if you think your work is shut out for its gender and color, you are simply wrong. There must be some other reason the Literati won’t accept you. I’d take a gander at that old “craft” thing, to start.  

As for the second question, only time will tell whether or not Rupi Kaur will land a place in literary history as one of the vangaurds of Wallace’s prophesied “New Sincerity” — or even whether or not a “New Sincerity” will occur at all. Some would argue that in contemporary society we are at our postmodern zenith. Nihilist irony certainly pervades our memes and Twitter feeds. The election of President Trump is about as postmodern a cultural twist as any. Some would argue that we are even developing a mass idiocracy, the opposite of Wallace’s hopeful enlightenment. Critic Alan Kirby calls our era “psuedomodernism,” an era characterized by “triteness and shallowness resulting from the instantaneous, direct, and superficial participation in culture made possible by the internet,” commissioning a cultural “silent autism.”  

But others have pointed out a recent shift that does resemble some sort of “New Sincerity,” that really might typify Wallace’s claims. The Atlantic praised certain musicians — Frank Ocean, Conor Oberst, Lady Gaga — for a post-ironic sincerity in their article “Sincerity, Not Irony, is our Age’s Ethos." Other critics note a shift in television from ironic comedies like Family Guy to more sincere emotion-driven comedies like The Office or Community. Couldn’t Rupi Kaur be it for Poetry? 

Whatever side you’re on, you can’t deny that Rupi’s arrival onto the Poetry scene has proved one irrefutable fact: the U.S. layman still cherishes poetry. Rupi Kaur’s popularity represents an appetite for a poetics that's sincere, heartfelt, non-cynical, and non-ironic, one that the public has been starved of since the 70s, especially those millennials and younger — Rupi’s primary readership — who’ve never known anything but cynicism in politics, TV, media, and art. They hunger for “authenticity.” People still want to feel poetic, people still want a poet — and the iconography of a poet, like T.S. Eliot or Bukowski or Dylan Thomas — to refer to, to listen to, to look up to, to pay to go see live. And the number of people who want this, as Rupi has proven, exist somewhere in the multimillions. Where have these masses been in the last 30 years, during Poetry’s wane? I don’t think that what we are experiencing today is a “renaissance” of interest in poetry so much as a prodigal son’s return of the poet to the reader. Rupi is the first poet in decades to write for the average, working-class person, not for the literary establishment, postmodern hipness, or for an “in-joke.” She’s a populist. She’s a democrat. She’s a rebel. She’s the voice of a demographic of bedroom poets heretofore suppressed for their triteness. And most importantly — and worth repeating — she satiates the poetic sentiment pop culture evinces itself to still hunger for.

In my eyes this new generation of Instapoets deserves a movement of their own. Fooey on the postmodernist’s criticism that Instagram poetry is “not real poetry.” Who are they — who really tested the boundaries of “real” poetry — to say anything? Postmodernism evolved out of television; this new movement is evolving out of the technology of its time. In my view these Instapoets command (perhaps rather poorly, I’ll concede) a sincere, new, rebellious voice, a voice of social affirmation and reassurance unique to themselves. And just like the postmodernists found their voice in previous generations’ anomalous texts, like Don Quixote, these instapoets find their roots in older generations’ oddities, too, like Rumi, Sappho, and most of all, Kahlil Gibran. (Rupi Kaur wrote the introduction to Penguin’s 2018 edition of Gibran’s seminal The Prophet). Let us call these Instapoets the Affirmationists, the poets of affirming melodrama, writer to reader, resurrecting that old bond severed by Barthes and Derrida.

I think — I really do — that in 100 years literary historians will look back on this “Rupi Kaur effect” with canonized fondness. No, I don’t think she will be appreciated as a craftswoman. No, I don’t think the canon will ever remember milk and honey as a work of “great” literature. Can we admit that Rupi Kaur’s poetry is bad, but also admit that something great has happened to poetry, and Rupi is responsible? Perhaps this is the start of a new era. Perhaps it’s like Rupi said, that “It’s like a peach… you have to remove everything and get to the pit.” Maybe Rupi’s pit is unpalatable and bitter and lord, just utterly bad, but if we plant that pit and wait, who knows? Maybe a whole new tree will grow. %