Mark, I agree that the dozen poems you saw are not particularly edgy. This poem near the beginning of
Milk and Honey probably doesn't look very edgy to you, either:
Quote:
you were so afraid
of my voice
i decided to be
afraid of it too
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But in the context of the poems surrounding it, it slices me to the bone.
Rather than paraphrase that context, I think I should let Kaur tell her own story in
Milk and Honey itself. But here's some of my personal story, which is similar enough to Kaur's in certain ways that I hope it will explain why I find the poem so devastating.
For the three years that I was ages five to seven, approximately, my sexual abusers threatened to kill me and/or my loved ones if I told anyone what they were doing to me. Their determination to silence me is unsurprising, since they wanted to get away with criminal behavior.
What might surprise you is how vehemently I was silenced by everyone to whom I tried to turn for help. They either:
a.) failed to understand a young child's circumlocutory efforts to find a way to report and escape things that she had solemnly sworn not to tell, under pain of death to herself and her loved ones; or
b.) decided that I must be telling outrageous lies about trusted adults in order to deflect blame for my own hypersexuality and acting-out with other children--which, BTW, are textbook symptoms of childhood sexual abuse; or
c.) feared the severe social repercussions that would come to me and to our family, if community gossip linked me to sexual impropriety.
I've written quite a few poems about c.)--a situation with some parallels to the Catholic Church's secretive handling of the clergy pedophilia scandal. I see the stigma-avoidance of c.) in this Kaur poem, too.
I imagine the poem as addressed to her parents, or perhaps just her mother. And I picture the narrator not only as a child bearing a secret that must be kept from the virginity-obsessed culture in which she lives, if she is to have any hope of marrying within it someday...but also as a poet struggling to find her voice.
As a poet, I've spent a lot of energy alternately self-censoring my childhood and trying to find effective ways to break my silence about it. When I consider writing about it, I fear that no one will understand or believe what I'm trying to communicate anyway, or that critics will (intentionally or unintentionally) stomp on my heart if I make myself too vulnerable.
These are well-founded fears. I've been told repeatedly (in various degrees of patience and politeness) certain "shock value" topics are a sensational, melodramatic clichés to be avoided. On the other hand, when I try to follow Dickinson's advice to "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant," my poems end up "telling it slant" to such a degree that no one can figure out what I'm alluding to at all. So then, in frustration, I steer clear of the daunting subject entirely for long stretches of time, and silence rules again.
Where certain topics are concerned, there seems to be no middle ground between too sensational and too coy.
But I think Rupi Kaur miraculously got it just right, with this simple, childlike expression.
And she makes this achievement seem effortless.
Or artless, some would complain. She didn't finesse the experience into a villanelle or a sonnet. She didn't use meter or rhyme. In fact, she utterly failed to employ any literary devices whatsoever--not even alliteration.
But if this explosive little poem, which perfectly expresses something I've tried for years to express, is bad poetry, then I honestly hope that I can someday produce something this lousy.
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