[Mark McDonnell]

Goodness, I just found this on YouTube. I'm going to leave my last word on the subject to this very articulate young woman, who is basically saying everything I've been trying to say but better. Perhaps it will be more palatable to people coming from a female millennial, rather than a 45 year old bloke.

https://youtu.be/a8kwg7pcTn8

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

But this review is ducks in a barrel. What is wrong with the book isn't nearly as interesting or as challenging to art as what is powerful in the book. (see post 48). The reviews depends on a subtext that anything being experienced by readers is only due to their shallow experiences having never stumbled across real poetry or feminist ideas before. I think things are stranger than that. The bits of poetry, and I admit it is sparse to my eyes, reminds me of Rumi run through a totally different body, time, and experience outside of literature, immersed in the muck of the present market/social medium/bleck. Yeah, it is a bag of ten cliches retooled and pressed into service, sometimes awkwardly. Ok. But it isn't "nothing but"...

And it isn't that I don't see what you are saying, or what that Cut article was poking fun at. I just find rooting for rather than against her more interesting.

[John Isbell]

Mark, I thought that video review was pretty articulate. It reminded me of my students' reactions to being offered texts that fail to interest them, except that many students are less full and nuanced in their opinion.
There is obviously no need for students to like a text just because I tell them it mattered to me, or to anybody else for that matter.

Cheers,
John

[R. S. Gwynn]

If we allow ourselves to get too subjective in our responses to poetry, we can end up "shaming" others for their lack of sensitivity. In the four-line poem quoted above, Rupi Kaur has written something like Blake's "A Poison Tree," but without any metaphor.

you were so afraid
of my voice
i decided to be
afraid of it too

This is not poetry but maxim. As a maxim it's not bad, but the "i decided" puts the pairs of lines in "so/that" or cause-effect relationship. Is "afraid" repeated in the same sense or in two different ones? Rhetorically, it's an interesting saying, but its ultimate meaning (the cause of the fear) has to be filled in by the reader.

When she ventures into metaphor, she is on less certain "ground."

there are mountains growing
beneath our feet
that cannot be contained
all we've endured
has prepared us for this
bring your hammers and fists
we have a glass ceiling to shatter -
let's leave this place roofless

I'm not sure how many stanzas the original contains, so I've printed it as a single stanza.

The mountains have to be metaphorical because literal mountains do not grow; if they do anything, the erode and grow smaller. The vagueness of "this," which seems to refer to that which "cannot be contained" is very vague. Now, into this outdoor mountain scene, the readers are encouraged to bring "hammers and fists" to break a "glass ceiling." This is a metaphorical jumble, which often happens when a cliched metaphor like "glass ceiling" is used. It would be like saying, "That's just water under the bridge to irrigate the crops." Cliched metaphors are easily mixed.

If we don't lean on it too hard, we get the gist of the message: "Things are changing (for women). We must add our own efforts to the struggle for advancement." Why "women"? Well, "glass ceiling" is a trope that is gender-based, and Kaur's audience seems primarily young women.

[Susan McLean]

Julie, I had read only the twelve poems of Kaur's that Mark had linked to. I like better the one you quoted; though it doesn't have as powerful an effect on me as it does on you, it strikes me as being a true insight stated in words that everyone can understand. And when I say that her poems lack artistry, I don't mean that they would have to be sonnets or villanelles to impress me. I am very impressed by Linda Pastan's work, for instance, which also is very direct and plainspoken. Looking at a few of her poems on the Poetry Foundation web site, I came across this series on the Seven Deadly Sins:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...ssue=1&page=24

It does assume that the reader knows a little about the concept of the seven deadly sins, but I think most people could still understand the poems quite easily and yet I find them to be very artful.

No one can dictate someone else's tastes. Poetry really is "whatever works for you." I'm just explaining my own tastes.

Susan

[Mark McDonnell]

Andrew,

'Just when I thought I was out' etc. I think I've said at least three times during the course of my posts that I wish her well, that I don't begrudge her success, that I understand that people are getting something genuinely meaningful from her. So in that sense I am rooting for her as much as you.

I haven't read the Cut article you refer to. I haven't read any of the reviews of her, apart from watching this YouTube video. I don't understand what you mean by 'ducks in a barrel'. It seemed like a completely sincere, unaffected, articulate review by someone who is in Kaur's key readership demographic: an intelligent, non-poetry reading young woman. And she didn't like it. For similar reasons that I don't much like it.

I also don't get the idea of rooting for or against her as being a position one has to take, one of which is more 'interesting' than the other. The only position I can take is one of artistic and aesthetic honesty. And I just don't think she's a very good writer. I'm exhausted now with trying to articulate what seems to me to be a very simple uncontroversial opinion.

Edit: cross posted with John, Susan and Sam. I'm definitely done now. (Maybe). Cheers.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Hey Mark.
I think you read me as coming after you for your dislike of her work, of wanting to get you to say its good. Not at all. I completely understand your take. I don't think you, or the blogger (who I have listened to on something else but can't recall) have any artistic or moral failings or lacking sensitivity. I just feel differently about it (and her words...and Elliot...and Hicks...and)

[Orwn Acra]

To maybe help Mark articulate his thoughts, at the risk of reading them totally wrong, I will point out that there are many, many Instagram poets who write exactly like Kaur. Her talents are not in literature but in marketing, in which she is kind of ingenious; literature is one of the three media by which she markets herself, the other two being her doodles and her Instagram posts. Since all of us here are interested in literature, we are speaking mainly of her poems, but I think to criticize her poems as if they were literature, instead of merely medium, is to miss their point rather spectacularly.

Maybe it is like a calligrapher who writes dreadful poems not because he cares about poetry, but because he needs something to write to show off his calligraphy. Kaur is a social media presence--that is her art form--and the poems are a means to that presence. The presence is the point, not the poetry.

[Aaron Novick]

Originally Posted by R. S. Gwynn

The mountains have to be metaphorical because literal mountains do not grow; if they do anything, the erode and grow smaller.

I'm now curious as to your views of the origin of mountains.

[John Isbell]

Orwn: "Maybe it is like a calligrapher who writes dreadful poems not because he cares about poetry, but because he needs something to write to show off his calligraphy."

The Alcazar in Seville has two sets of mural calligraphy: that predating the Reconquista, which is verses from the Koran, and that postdating it, done by Mozarabic artists who spoke no Arabic. It is gibberish. Both, to those who don't read Arabic, are of equal beauty.

Cheers,
John