Eratosphere - Rupi Kaur

I don't think you have anything to apologize for, Mark. If we can't speak honestly here, on a poetry workshop site, about what we like or dislike in someone's poetry, then where can we?

For the past few days I've been wondering what the late M.A. Griffiths (Eratosphere's "grasshopper," a.k.a. Margaret or Maz) might have added to this discussion about Rupi Kaur's work.

Disclaimer: Of course we really can't know what any deceased person would have thought about current events, and it would be very presumptuous of me even to conjecture, so I won't. But I can think of lots of Maz's comments about other poems, and about art in general, that might be applicable to Kaur's work--in interestingly contradictory ways.

Maz certainly did not suffer crap lightly. She had very little tolerance for being told that she must suspend her usual standards when attempting to evaluate certain pieces of poetry or other art, for any reason. Sometimes it would be because those pieces claimed to be intentionally edgy or experimental or transgressive. She grumbled that certain participants in online poetry workshops were perennially idolized and gushed over because of their personalities or reputations, regardless of the merits of the particular poem being critiqued. And she complained sometimes (in retrospect, and in general terms) that when the subject was the poet's own cancer or rape or loss or other harrowing experience, everyone seemed obliged to call the poem brave and honest and moving work, regardless of its flaws.

Yet Maz often did experimental things, and employed "shock value" topics in her own work, in ways that others disliked.

One of the weakest poems in her collected works is a long prose poem called "Tradition," which involves female genital mutilation. When Maz workshopped it (in a more free-verse-centric online forum, not Eratosphere), someone responded: "Great story. I would like to see the poem. I can imagine the power it might have in your hands."

Maz's response:

Quote:

Eh, whaddya mean, you’d like to see the poem?
This IS the poem, lad.
(Cheek!)
LOL.
To be more serious, I consider the voice of the child is the poem. Am aware many will disagree.
Kind regards,
grasshopper

I think "the voice of the child is the poem" in some of Kaur's works, too.

Is such a thing really enough to transform a piece of writing into a poem? Most would say (and have said) that it's not enough for them. It's certainly not enough for me in "Tradition," which I don't like on any level.

But I remembered the comment, and thought that Maz might have been inclined to appreciate that aspect of Kaur.

On the other hand, I've also been thinking of Maz's unenthusiastic comments on conceptual art. Some of her thoughts below strike me as very similar to comments others were making in this thread--particularly when she discusses the importance of context to modern pieces that are not intended to (and generally cannot) stand on their own as art. She objects that the audience has to do most of the work to get anything valuable from such pieces, which is not far from what Sam was saying about the tabula rasa effect. And there's another connection to Kaur in that the Tracey Emin art installation to which Maz refers below featured menstrual blood, as does that infamous Rupi Kaur photo (here).

Quote:

The idea behind Conceptual Art, if I understand it correctly, is that it is not the actual artwork or installation that is important but the Concept behind it – as in the famous pile of bricks, which were ordinary bricks in a pile, but labelled as a work of art. The trouble with this, I feel, is that it depends too much on context, so you could re-christen it Contextual Art. In other words, it needs a sort of parenthesis to identity it as Art, and not just a pile of bricks or a dirty old bed or a crumpled piece of paper.

But if something only becomes Art through its context, I think we have the right to question its worth.

Being experimental doesn’t necessarily make something good or exciting. I don’t think we have to make a pilgrimage to the Tate before deciding there is something uninviting and vacuous about a room with a light flashing on and off. Surely this Concept had been explored in terms of space by architecture (in a functional way) and in terms of light by films and television (in an entertaining way).

Commenting on this Concept is not the same thing as commenting on a poem, because a poem has its own separate existence – it is not just a Concept.

With the Concept, the spectator is expected to do most of the work. As a spectator, I am not prepared to accept this. The artist should do most of the work, or what’s an artist for? We can all collect our own bits of rubbish, give the result a posey title, and put it on a plinth. Does this have any less value than what is often presented in galleries as Art, because it bears an Artist’s name?

What I often see today is Junk Art to go with our junk food, and a series of flashy and/or pretentious gimmicks treated with hushed reverence. I am told these are deep and meaningful, but I am not convinced, which I’m sure labels me as a Philistine.

What is often ignored is the simple truth that being traditional doesn’t mean something is automatically bad, and being new doesn’t mean something is automatically good.

Here are my notes on the artworks cited above, if anyone's interested:

In 1976, the Tate Gallery’s purchase of US artist Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (consisting of 140 bricks) sparked one of the great modern art controversies.

My Bed, exhibited at the Tate in 1999 when shortlisted for the Turner Prize, consisted of British artist Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, used condoms, menstrual blood, and assorted other objects in disarray.

Work No. 88, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (1994), was one of Martin Creed’s most famous works before his Turner Prize-winning Work No. 227, the lights going on and off (2001). The latter consisted of an empty room with its electric lights switching on and off in five-second intervals.

Here's another comment from Maz on the same theme:

Quote:

I’ve seen the view expressed that if an author calls something a poem, it is a poem – but I don’t agree with that. Art, it seems to me, is a two-way thing. 

I recall years ago, there was a terrible fuss when a cleaner cleared out what looked like a cluttered workstation, but what was apparently an extremely valuable Work of Art. My problem with this is that modern art often seems to be Art only when the context is clear – apart from that, it can be taken as junk, or at best as a gimmick. 

And there is the inbuilt pseud-y effect, too. If someone can expound upon a terrific amount of significance in something that most people would not see as significant, doesn’t that point them out as being more perceptive, sensitive and deep than the hoi polloi?

And obviously, if you can gain academic prestige and financial rewards from exploring and championing the latest literary gimmick, common sense isn’t going to weigh very heavily in the balance.

The latter passage might refer to either of two well-publicised incidents in British art museums.

The first was in October 2001, when a cleaner at the Eyestorm Gallery in Mayfair tidied Damien Hirst’s recreation of an ashtray- and detritus-filled studio table. (The timing suggests that this incident directly influenced Maz's "A Pair of Tate Limericks.")

The second was in August 2004, when a cleaner at the Tate Gallery in London – unaware that the entire area comprised a Gustav Metzger installation – disposed of a bag of rubbish on the floor beside an office desk.

* * *

Many other comments by Maz come to mind, but this post is long enough already. I hope someday to get copyright permissions to publish what I've gathered of Maz's prose. (And the two limericks she wrote about the Tate Museum, too, which are still unpublished.)