Thread: Rupi Kaur
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Unread 01-10-2018, 02:28 PM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Michael, it has! Well, me at least. Thanks to Julie, I spent a couple of hours last night trawling the Internet and old 'sphere threads in search of her. What a remarkable story and person and what a poet. It's a cliche to say you feel like you know someone without having met them, and of course I never even interacted with her 'virtually', but that feeling was there. I wish I really had.

There's an interesting link to be made with Rupi Kaur (about whom I've probably said enough) that nobody has picked up on. I said to Walter a few posts back that 'I would love to live in a world where (a poet) was a social media phenomenon and a genuinely good writer. Is that to much to ask?' to which he replied 'Mark, that is far too much to ask!' Now, his tongue was somewhat in his cheek I assume, but in researching Maz it struck me that she was a kind of pre-social media Internet phenomenon who similarly eschewed the normal channels of publishing: from her Wikipedia 'Rather than seek publication through traditional channels, she was content to share her work with fellow poets on various Internet forum.

What a difference in ten short years, from when the online world was a place for a hugely talented introvert to flourish and find slow but real recognition, to the extrovert self-publicising world of Instagram poetry with its 'marketing' and 'presence', where it's taken as a given that the quality of the actual poems is a small part of the overall package. But I'll stop before I sound simultaneously naive and grumpy. (Before?)

So yes, thanks for the introduction.

Last edited by Mark McDonnell; 01-10-2018 at 03:19 PM.
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