“Instapoets” has become the term used to describe a new generation of writers including Lang Leav, Tyler Knott Gregson and Robert M. Kaur’s popularity on Instagram is part of a trend so prominent in publishing right now that it’s spawned its own genre. “In this digital world where content marketing is this sort of buzzword, Rupi is the content and it doesn’t need the marketing.” “She’s given voice to things that people may not have been able to articulate for themselves,” she says. Why they stayed is simple, according to Kirsty Melville, the president and publisher of Andrews McMeel Publishing, which had previously been best known for releasing Calvin and Hobbes. “I think that day, this anxiety came upon me that’s never left,” she says, recalling how scary it was to get “that much hate literally from every corner of the planet.” While Kaur says she received overwhelming support from the letter – the most memorable, she says, was an email from a war general in Afghanistan – she also never experienced “so many people saying so many mean things and telling me they were going to kill me.” Still, she doesn’t deny that the strongly worded letter benefited her career: “They came for the photo, but they stayed for the poetry.” Kaur’s response went viral and soon she was doing interviews with The Huffington Post and Vice about the need to “demystify the period.” Talking to Kaur now, she says she wishes she never wrote that letter – curious, since that’s how so many people found her Instagram. We will not be censored,” she wrote on Facebook, in a post that’s been shared over 18,000 times. The site eventually apologized and reposted the photo, but not before Kaur wrote a letter reprimanding them for trying to censor her. Instagram removed the image – which was for a college assignment in which she was asked to “challenge a taboo” – two separate times for breaking community guidelines. Three years ago, Kaur posted a shot of herself lying in a bed with her back to the camera, menstrual blood leaking through her sweatpants. Though she’s made her name with words, Kaur’s initial Instagram fame had nothing to do with her poetry. Sadness looks the same across all cultures, races, and communities. “People will understand and they’ll feel it because it all just goes back to the human emotion. “I’ve realized, it’s not the exact content that people connect with,” she says. Instead, Kaur wanted to do something more accessable. “It was like doing surgery on the damn thing.” “I would have to pull out the list of literary devices my teacher gave me and my 10 colorful pens,” she says, her big, almond eyes getting wider. “You have to remove everything and get to the pit of it.” Kaur – who moved from Punjab, India to the suburbs of Ontario, Canada, when she was three and a half years old and now lives in Toronto – doesn’t want readers to agonize over each and every word like she did when learning poetry in school. Now there’s even a book called Milk and Vine that’s quickly become an Amazon bestseller since its October release. Milk and Honey officially became a meme earlier this year when people starting taking the text from Vine videos and stylizing them like one of her poems. Parody accounts have shown up on Twitter that intend to show how easy it is to write a Rupi Kaur poem – the gist being you take any conversation, format it in all lowercase and insert random line breaks.
Uncomplicated and concise, Kaur’s poetry has been criticized for being too simplistic. But this story of what was supposed to be a nausea-free victory lap, which she spares me the gross details of finishing, is just the kind of anecdote her 1.9 million Instagram followers would adore. It’s a celebration which kicked off the night before with a live performance of her work featuring Westfeldt, YouTube star Lilly Singh and fellow poet Chloe Wade. Trying to keep fruit down isn’t exactly how the 25-year-old imagined she’d be celebrating the release of her second collection of poetry, The Sun and Her Flowers. “I was like, ‘You’re talking about something so deep right now, but the strawberries are coming back up girl, I gotta go.'” “I knew something was wrong when I was talking to Jennifer and the green haze came over me,” she says in between sips of red Gatorade. Sitting on a king-size mattress in her Soho Grand hotel room, Kaur tells the story of how she almost lost her brunch all over actress Jennifer Westfeldt. Rupi Kaur is too sick to get out of bed and wishes she had realized this a few hours earlier.
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