/lit/ - Literature

it's not a question of proving that she is good, it's she hasn't achieved maximal badness, which is the destiny of poetry

she isn't a poet at all
>prove it
only calliope can do that really

>>11036971
all poetry is shit

>>11036971
she needs to add pictures to all of her poems to get an image across

>>11036971
It's just a sentence broken up arbitrarily into lines. It has no meter or rhyme, which are more important than people realise, and the content of her poems is garbage that only roasties can relate to. Her poems are more like retarded blog posts.

>>11037325
>IF I WRITE SOMETHING AND IT RHYMES AND ITS IN TIME IT MEANS MORE LOL
why not write a fucking song you retarded talentless asshat

only real niggas understand her

>>11037347
>Not recognizing the subconscious appeal to rythm involved in meter
Pseud

>>11037325
>It's just a sentence broken up arbitrarily into lines. It has no meter or rhyme
tell me more...

>>11037387
thanks for proving my point that poetry is just horrible music

Same lips
that be
talkin'
'bout me

Is the same lips
that be
ass kissin'

These hoes ain't
what they say they are
And their pussy stank,
they catfishin'

--Rupi Kaur

you were a glass
of orange juice

but I had just
brushed my teeth

- pupi kaur

>>11037356
this is fucking awful.

>>11037356
the fuck is that drawing?

>>11037485

You a pussy and a rat
You like Tom and Jerry

I might just
feel on your babe,
my pussy
feel like a lake.
He wanna swim
with his face, I'm like,
"Okay"

>>11037597
This would be much better if the awkward line breaks didn't exist

>>11037356
>>11037624

>>11036971
I can and I fucking will.

Meter and timing and form are all fine. Poetry is like painting with the meanings, shapes, and sounds of words. It doesn't have to rhyme if, say, the wording conveys a deep, seldom-tapped meaning or emotion that many never knew they could relate to. So that's not an issue.

The first issue about her poetry is her prose. It is base and simplistic beyond mere modern relatability. Her vocabulary is limited, and not intentionally, for she consistently uses excessive wording in place of fewer stronger, more applicable words. She misses powerful words that could either lend her poetry a more abstract and metaphorical air, or a deeper concrete and heavily-grounded air. At the same time, she will use the occasional more complex word, but only to emphasize the wrong idea (i.e. focusing on words that don't support the main idea of her own poem), or to put an inconsistent tone on the intended idea behind the word. It makes her vocabulary appear limited and as if it were a weak point.

Now, If her word choices were more powerful (be it in either an abstract or concrete direction), then I could forgive her second shortcoming: Semantics. He prose consists of incredibly pedestrian concepts. "Deep" introspections and ideas that are so commonplace the average grade-schooler considers them. "People are selfish", "Some people are still racist", "Women deserve more than average man", "Give peace and love a chance" etc. Even this would be acceptable if she at least compiled a cluster of like ideas and illustrated a relationship between them in each poem, but instead, Kaur just leaves it at one surface-level perspective of one simplistic idea and calls it a day. Poem done, time for the next one. Phew, it's hard being an artistic genius!

And there's >>11037239's valid point: She requires the use of visual aid to supplement her poor prose. Her artistic skills are left wanting too, even for organic, in-the-moment pencil sketches.

It all comes together as "poor in depth, but when the different mediums are gestalted together it's kind of acceptable in breadth". But acceptable isn't what sells. Kaur's real hook is her social-labels combo: Female, Not-White, Feminist, LGBT-positive, etc. When those little social-bonus-points labels get applied, then she's not judged on a universal scale. She doesn't have to compete for the title of "good". She can just attain the title of "Good, for an ethnic woman who also draws and focuses on topical social controversy", which puts her in the "big fish in a little pond" category. This ends up being successful for her, because most people never bother to measure the size of the pond, they just see and are told about what seems like a big fish.

Fuck Rupi Kaur. Anyone who thinks him or her self a poet should first read some of Keats' personal letters where he talks about what makes a good poem.

>>11036971
>hundreds of millions killed in 20th century by smallpox
>hundreds of millions killed by Black Plague
>50 million by Plague of Justinian
>hundreds of thousands killed in the Holocaust
>the most difficult thing is we don't celebrate each other
deep

>>11036971
>projecting, the poem

is she just trying to do rumi poetry?

>>11037356
Jesus Christ, the beginning was alright, but then she shat on it. She doesn't even have any respect for her own writing.

>>11037955
Nice effort

>>11037356
you made it up fucker

>>11037787

is young thug a better poet than kuri kaur

>>11037955
You are smart and I enjoyed reading that

>>11037347
You obviously haven't looked into rhyme and meter.

>>11038224

"horses dont stop. they keep going." his introductory adlib "YSL (young stoner life) for life" is meant to serve as a double entendre subliminally injecting the phrase "why suffer life" into the listeners ear. read the book of thug.

>>11038224
Why suffer life?
Horses don't stop, they keep goin'
You can lose your life but it gon' keep goin'
Why not risk life when it's gon' keep goin'?
When you die somebody else was born

>>11036971

>assuming people on /lit/ are capable of judging the quality of any literary work

yeah, good luck with that

>>11037704
I just made it up tho fren

>>11037955
This is a really good analysis, and I agree, but you should add examples from her poetry to support your ideas.

>>11037325
So? How does that make her bad?

>>11038610
It makes her poetry bad, and by extension she is a bad poet.

>>11037955
I don't believe she belongs to the same school of poetry as Keats so a judgment in that regard is misguided. There is not a single way to make poetry, and hers -- from what I can read -- belongs more to the set that concerns itself with 'authenticity', 'immediacy', etc., but with the colloquialisms that typify postmodern poetry in the 20th century (and observations) directed by the phrasing, terminology, etc. of liberal arts discourse. So to my mind her vocabulary is limited, I agree, but it is also reflective of the toolbox she uses to perceive the events around her, especially as a woman of colour, using that kind of pseudo-literacy that makes one aware of these French terms and their typical use currently, but without the rigour in actually applying these terms consistently and fully. So I can't fault her for the shallowness or the flabbiness (it's like an undergrad essay) because they are reflective of a certain social and historical context in both content and form as it affects the continuation of a type of postmodern poetry opened by poets like those of the New York School, Black Mountain College, etc.

But she's not good either even if she's the 'poet we deserve', and this is my problem with contemporary art generally: it is not aware of its own historical conditions and does not engage with them at all. It lives in the house of postmodernism but does not do the chores or do general maintenance around that house. I justify this because I believe that since an avant-garde has existed and opened the possibility of the questioning of art, that the notion still exists today but is not being carried out historically. After all, this is the 'contemporary' where history is effaced and everyone seems to be trying to create something from scratch without first acknowledging the conditions of possibility for that creation.

>>11038156
Are you retarded?

>>11036971
so basically we hate it when our friends become successful, huh, And if we can destroy them
You bet your life we will
Destroy them
If we can hurt them
Well, we may as well
It's really laughable
Ha, ha, ha

My poop stinks
Flecked with corn
I inhale
And barf
Cool
-poopy power

>>11036971
2deep4me

>>11036971
fuck this is bad. whoever buy her book deserved the gulag

>>11037955
thank you for the recommendation about the keats letters and the analysis. please keep posting on this board. it's becoming rarer for people to coherently argue for their opinions this well.

>>11038431
>screencapping your own posts

>>11037356
>digits
check'd

>>11038788
Excellent exploration and expansion of my points on Kaur's poetry.
I agree - One has to judge her on the merits of her knowledge and experiences coming into poetry. Keats was writing in a time when poetry and writing were more highly valued and scrutinized. Kaur is writing in a time when topical civil rights issues are the only reason most poetry or writing gets read at all. But all that aside, it speaks for Kaur's (and by extension our own) generation when Kaur, a known writer in her early 20s, with a luxurious and healthy upbringing, all of literary history behind her, the academic resources to easily access it, and the global internet connection to distribute her work, is gaining fame for publishing what amounts to narrow-perspective high school English class assignments, due to her unambitious pursuit of knowledge and experience, while Keats, at the same age, had many tragic setbacks in life (including an early end), disregarded all of it to pursue further education into poetry as he delved into practicing it and continuously improving, used only a school newspaper to distribute his initial work, and rightly became famous for his efforts while writers of lesser skill were disregarded.

>>11036971
I rate a poem according to how well it communicates a concept. This is broken down into several categories.

Impact: 0/10. This poem doesn't make me feel at all.
Detail: 0/10. This poem just boils down to "envy is bad." It doesn't really have any detail and isn't specific. You could make a little melody called The Color of Envy or something and it'd have more detail.
Universality: 10/10. This poem should be understandable by a first grader.
Clarity: 10/10. This poem should be understandable by a first grader.

I rate this poem 5/10.

>>11039951
>muh categories
film critic-tier

>>11039522
based

>>11039951
this is some well crafted bait I have to admit

>>11037325
>Never heard of free verse

>>11036971
This is pure leftist commie trash
>no one should compete, everyone should be equal, no one is exceptional
You should be jealous of others successes because it drives you to do better. Imagine being such a cuck you're happy when others best you. though at least it does prove the leftist endgame

>>11040878
Free verse is garbage for all the same reasons. Some can write better free verse than others though.

>>11037356
>horses
it's "hustlers"

>>11037955
/lit/s obsession with Rupi has made me want to explore poetry more, thank you for this criticism.

>>11037347
Rhyme is not essential, but if there are no deliberate patterns to the meter then it's not poetry.

the people who complain about rupi kaur really have no clue how deep the rabbit hole goes when it comes to bad instagram poetry.

a lot of people saw her get ten million followers or something and thought "hey, me too." but rupi kaur's poetry at least uses images. can you imagine someone writing poetry without any images and finding sincere success for it?

>>11037955
shallow analysis but fundamentally correct

only the most commercially accessible themes find a recurring audience in instagram poetry, and even then they are rarely altered beyond their explicit content. as long as the extraneous aesthetic is pleasing, you can say the most basic bitch shit, wihout any subtext, slap on a poetry hashtag, and wait for the followers and book deals to roll in.

I'm just bitter, I legitimately enjoy writing and sharing poetry, and have fun with my own instagram poetry account, but then turn around and see asshit like THIS with thousands of likes and comments. It makes me feels so petty.

>>11036971
Bloody discharge
oozing from myself
it may upset some
but for me
it is a symbol

>>11042545
sword means penis, right?

>>11036971
Who are these people who supposedly like to see others failing? Whenever I see shit like this, I can't help but feel that it's just the person who wrote it projecting their own toxic personality, because I don't know a single person who thinks like that.

>>11036971
Thanks for the protip, I guess I won't try.

>>11036971
You're right, "proving" a poet's goodness or badness is impossible, because art is subjective. But we can come to an expert consensus, and that expert consensus is that Kaur is a meme. The absence of substantive subtext, lack of lyricism, and small range she displays is not enough to make her a figure worth reading, let alone studying seriously.

she didn't even talk about esotericism, anyone can make observations

What sucks about dying
is that it is bad

Instapoetry is like the second death of poetry after greeting cards

>>11044185
Don't pretend they ever spent a lot of time on that shit

Do you have any idea how long it takes to cook a fucking ox?

>>11036971
You proved it with your own post

>>11043819
i hope 95% of the people i know (and 100% of /lit/, excluding myself) to die in poverty and abject failure

>>11036971
Every good poem written by Miss Kaur has a thousand shit poems to be sorted through.
This is simply not worth the effort, as I can just read an actual good poet and enjoy what I'm reading.

>>11038788
>It lives in the house of postmodernism but does not do the chores or do general maintenance around that house.
Point well made

>>11043819
>I don't know a single person who thinks like that.
You're either an idiot and saint of the Prince Myshkin caliber, or are very grossly lying to yourself.

>>11036971
Look at her 'poetry', that's all the proof you should need.

>>11037955
good post