First of all. Hi Julie!
Secondly, I hadn't heard of Rupi Kaur until I read this thread and Andrew's description intrigued me. Then I found some of her
poems online (12 poems that
will make me read her book, apparently) and I have to say they're worse than I thought they were going to be. I love raw emotion in poetry. I love simplicity in poetry. But these things seem barely distinguishable from the sort of 'inspirational' memes that appear all over the internet and social media, usually with a sunset or a cat in the background (apart from the line 'your body /is a museum /of natural disasters' -- I liked that).
I watched the video. She seems very intelligent and sincere and, as she says herself, not at all interested in the literary world. I don't at all begrudge her hard-earned success, or think it 'unjustified', and I have no doubt that people do find her poems genuinely inspirational. Which is great. But it's pretty poor poetry to be selling in the hundreds of thousands. And whether she's white /Asian/black/male/female/gay/ straight / has lived a charmed life or a harrowing one, there's no point pretending it isn't.
I agree with Julie that her success isn't going to take any kind of spotlight away from other more 'deserving' poets. But I disagree, I'm afraid, that exposure to her poetry will necessarily act as a 'gateway' to 'better' poetry for many young people (maybe some!). This could be the cynicism of nearly two decades of teaching 11 to 18 year olds in high schools talking, but in my experience teenagers have always gone gaga for this sort of stuff. But break out the Shakespeare and Keats and it's just more 'work'. They see the two things as completely separate. The rare students who
do get interested in poetry don't need the Rupi Kaur 'gateway'; their eyes will light up at the Shakespeare. As they should! I kind of feel the same about YA fiction, in a way. When I was a young teen in the 80s (grumpy old man alert) I went straight from reading children's books to Stephen King, Poe, Dickens and Charlotte Bronte. Because there wasn't really a 'gateway': a heavily marketed 'in-between' genre aimed specifically at me. King, as the 'contemporary' choice of the time, was massive among reading teens in the 80s and he's a
much better writer than the John Greens and Suzanne Collins of the world. I think things like YA and poetry like Kaur's have got more young people reading (which is good), but that they also have the effect of locking people into a sort of arrested development when it comes to reading, so lots of people get into their 30s having never progressed beyond this stuff. But then again, so what?
Anyway, that's my incredibly boring opinion.
Good luck to Rupi Kaur, I like her doodles.