Rupi Kaur: The superstar poet that critics love to hate

Here’s a fact that would have sounded wildly unlikely a decade ago: the most popular and influential poet writing in English today is a Punjabi Canadian truck driver’s daughter who self-published her first collection at just 21.

Few books this century have changed the publishing landscape as much as Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey (2014). In commercial terms, Kaur’s impact on poetry bears comparison with JK Rowling’s impact on children’s writing.

One week in 2021, for instance, three out of the top six books in the New York Times bestsellers list for paperback fiction weren’t fiction at all – they were Kaur’s three poetry collections. It’s hard to overstate how rare this kind of success is. The average poet would be lucky to sell a thousand copies of their debut. Milk and Honey has sold over six million.

Obviously, it’s not quite what Kaur had expected when she first started performing her poems to crowds she could count on her fingers and toes as a “terrified” 17-year-old, she tells me. She’s speaking over Zoom from Montreal, where she’s in town for the One Young World Summit.

Now 31, revisiting Milk and Honey for an expanded 10th-anniversary edition, she’s been reflecting on what it was like to suddenly find millions of people reading her stark, confessional poems about abuse and toxic relationships.

“It was overwhelming,” she says. “I feel like I disassociated quite a bit. When people at book signings would open it up to a poem about sexual assault and point at it and say ‘this is my favourite piece, this is why I love this book,’ it would hit me in the face. I’d get a bit anxious like, oh my God, that’s out there in the world? That’s freaking me out.”

Her best poetry can be strikingly uninhibited. “The therapist places / the doll in front of you / it is the size of girls / your uncles like touching // point to where his hands were,” she writes in a poem called “midweek sessions”.

As a young writer, “When I visited the bookstore, I found the poetry section in a dusty corner at the back that nobody visited. The publishing industry did not believe that this was a genre that people – especially young people – would want to read.” Things have changed: a 2019 study found that two-thirds of poetry-buyers are now under 34.

The other big shift is one of genre: Kaur is the queen of “Instapoetry”, a portmanteau of “poetry” and “Instagram”, where many of today’s most popular poets build their audience by self-publishing. The lucky ones are picked up by Kaur’s press, Andrews McMeel. An outfit previously best known for printing calendars and comic strips, it spotted Milk and Honey when the self-published volume was selling in the tens of thousands, and cannily snapped up the rights for a trade edition; in many bookshops, you’re more likely to see Andrews McMeel than Penguin or Faber on the poetry shelf.

Almost always in free verse and straightforward enough to take in quickly while scrolling, Instapoetry has been decried by some critics as the death of poetry. Kaur’s reviews have often been savage, though these days she can shrug them off. “My work isn’t for everybody and I don’t want it to be for everybody. But when I was younger…” she sighs. “When you’re 21 and don’t know anything about the world yet, it can be hard.”

But as Emily Wilson, the acclaimed translator of Homer, has written: “Many readers with no interest in any other poetry—including one of my own daughters—have found a kind of spiritual salvation in Kaur’s visceral, poetic evocations of the struggles of young womanhood.” Kaur’s poetry, Wilson added, is “clear to the point of didacticism” – a weakness, to her detractors. But to fans, her verse – often accompanied by Stevie Smith-like doodles – embodies Alexander Pope’s ideal for poetry: “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

“Ne’er” might be stretching it: similarities between her work and that of other Instapoets have led to accusations of plagiarism, though none have gained much traction. Given the slogan-like nature of some of the work, coincidences are unavoidable. For instance, “You are your own soul mate” is the full text of a poem by Kaur; it’s also the subtitle of a self-help book published in 2003.

But she bats away concerns about seeming unoriginal: “When we look at different eras we see that writers, artists and poets of that era are responding to the same world with similar words because those are words of that era.”

Though Kaur started out writing on Tumblr, it’s Instagram that made her famous – initially by trying to shut her down. In 2015, the site censored a picture she’d posted – an image of herself fully clothed, but with a menstrual-blood stain on her tracksuit bottoms – sparking a row that put her name into the headlines, and introduced many to her poetry.

Fame has brought the difficult decisions that come with being a public figure. In November 2023, Kaur was invited by Kamala Harris to a Diwali party at the White House – an event she saw as wildly insensitive, given the ongoing war in Gaza. “How can we celebrate defeating darkness with light when this is happening in the world?” She refused, as she strongly disagreed with Harris’s stance toward Israel and Palestine. “If I were invited to the same event again, I would say no whether [Harris] was VP or president.” Still, she believes that “Over Trump, we need her to become president.”

Kaur was born in Punjab, India, in 1992. Her father moved to Canada when she was a baby, the rest of the family following a few years later. She and her siblings grew up in a one-bedroom basement flat in Malton, Ontario. “My mum has four kids – I’m the oldest of four – and she’s still sad that none of us are doctors,” she says, with a comic eye-roll, but adds that they’re “really proud”.

“When a lot of my original readership was on Tumblr, my biggest fear at that age was that somebody’s going to print these poems out and send them to my house and I’ll get in trouble because I’ve got quite strict parents – so I couldn’t tell them about the book until the book came out, which is, like, so classic of me.” “The funny thing is, the book has been out for a decade. Have we ever talked about what’s inside of it? Absolutely not!” She laughs.

“To this day they’re like, ‘can you please just give us a heads up?’ Because sometimes the things I do will go viral and they’ll find out about it from the Punjabi radio station or some uncles and aunties in the community and they’re like ‘it would just be nice to hear about it from you rather than a random stranger.”

It was 2009, while at Turner Fenton secondary school, that Kaur began reciting her poetry at activist events. Her father wasn’t pleased. “He wasn’t very happy about because he’s a refugee, and he faced a lot of repercussions for being a sort of activist and revolutionary back home in India. When the 1984 Sikh genocide happened, he was picked up by the police – his friends were picked up, tortured, disappeared. He was luckily able to survive – he made it to Canada where we reunited with him. But I think because he had that experience the last thing he wanted was one of his kids being involved in any type of activism because he knows how much one can lose because of it.”

As an activist, she’s supported un-flashy causes many of her mostly young and North American fans might otherwise have been otherwise unaware of – such as the Punjabi farmers’ protests of 2020-21.

Her father once wrote poetry too – a few years ago, Kaur found a hand-written book of love-poems he’d composed for her mother, one of which used the phrase “milk and honey” – but never wrote after moving to Canada. “I barely saw him growing up,” she says. “He was driving seven days out of the week – Montreal to California, Montreal to Texas, six day journeys. He would come back on the seventh day, sleep, and within 10 hours he was back on the road again. And so this was the only example I had about what work and working looked like.”

He shaped her sometimes masochistic-sounding work ethic. Writing The Sun and Her Flowers, the follow-up to Milk and Honey, she “would almost punish myself – I would force myself to sit there for up to 10 hours a day and keep going and keep going. Everyone around me was working class – they drove trucks, they had long shifts at the factories – and that was what I aspired to. I felt like if I was doing anything less, then I wasn’t working hard enough, and I think that damaged me.”

In recent years, she’s slowly taught herself to write for pleasure again, looking for “a sense of play”. She sounds happy and relaxed, describing her simple morning routine of writing in cafes. She felt crippling “productivity anxiety” about writing enough to meet her publishers’ deadlines for her last two collections. She has told them she doesn’t want a deadline for the next one; it’ll be written when it’s written. Rupi Kaur has spent 10 years proving to the world that poetry can be an industry. Now she’s more concerned with proving to herself that it can also be fun.

Milk and Honey is out now. One Young World runs until Sept 21