TORONTO -- According to a prominent U.S. magazine, the writer of the decade isn’t a Booker Prize-winner or the author of a wildly successful fantasy series. In fact, she isn’t even 30.
The New Republic ruffled more than a few feathers when one of its writers named Rupi Kaur, a 27-year-old poet from Brampton, Ont., the “writer of the decade.” The article has inspired a fresh wave of attacks from Kaur’s biggest critics and also defence from her most devoted fans, including NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
In terms of book sales, Kaur is one of the world’s most successful living poets. She has sold more than 3.5 million copies of her two poetry collections, “milk and honey” and “the sun and her flowers,” both of which topped The New York Times bestseller list for well over a year.
But critics say Kaur’s success has less to do with literary talent and more to do with her popularity on Instagram, where she has amassed 3.8 million followers with brief lines of her poetry alongside black-and-white sketches. The medium is commonly referred to by both fans and critics as “Instapoetry.”
Kaur is hardly the first “Instapoet” to foster a large following, but she is easily the most successful. Her debut collection, “milk and honey,” was credited with almost single-handedly increasing sales of Canadian poetry by 79 per cent the year it dropped.
Those book sales have drawn plenty of young fans, but also eye-rolling disapproval in some literary circles. Critics have accused Kaur of writing “mildly interesting stream-of-consciousness shower thoughts” that “lack originality” and overzealously use line breaks for dramatic effect. On Twitter, mocking Kaur’s fragmented style has become a meme of its own.
In the New Republic, writer Rumaan Alam dismissed this criticism.
“That her work crumbles under traditional critical scrutiny is not really the point. There are readers who will forever think of Kaur as the first poet they loved. Even if they outgrow her … the lines in Milk and Honey will be a common text for the fortysomethings of 2035,” Alam wrote.
Alam later writes: “I don’t know if we’ll be reading Rupi Kaur a decade or two hence, but I suspect we’ll be reading as she taught us to.”
The article stirred up new criticism for the already oft-criticized young poet.
“if rupi kaur is poet of the decade than my notes app from when i was 13 is also poet of the decade,” one Twitter user wrote.
Another user described her as “the imagine dragons of poetry.” Others used the opportunity to praise poets they love.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who was publically endorsed by Kaur during the 2019 election, responded to those attacks on Tuesday, tweeting that Kaur’s words “hit you in your heart” and that “no amount of hate can shadow the brilliant light of @rupikaur_’s excellence.”
Billy-Ray Belcourt, an award-winning poet and Rhodes scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation, tweeted that “maybe the silver lining of the rupi kaur discourse is that it illuminates that many of us have our own poet/s of the decade and would risk it all for them and that the 2010s saw a newly vitalized world of poetry both institutional and uninstitutional!!”
Kaur has not yet publicly responded to the New Republic piece.
