WHY IS THE POETRY WORLD pretending that poetry is not an art form? I refer to the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’—buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work. The short answer is that artless poetry sells.
Rebecca Watts: The Cult of the Noble Amateur
Insta-Limerick
A poetess/princess, Miss Kaur
Was promoted through publishing’s power.
Scrawling lines for a hobby,
This perky Punjabi
Turned rupees to dollars per hour.
CONNECT/HOOK 
Wonderful limerick and excellent article — thanks for sharing. It appears to me that we are hungry for poetry, or the arts in general — the deeper truth, and be it only an aesthetic one, that can be unearthed from its depths. We hunger for it, we gravitate towards it, but we have unlearned to reach for it, or understand it, or grasp it with our fruitfly attention spans. Add to that a market, and the commonplace celebration of mediocrity (we are all equal, after all!), and a sprinkle of disembodied ‘everybody is a star on social media’, and you have unedited twitter poetry purged on a page. Quo vadis, world. Sigh.
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Thanks for reading and for an articulate commentary, Anna. Nothing against Miss Rupi, I just don’t get the poetic appeal of vapid.
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She has a good business model, at the very least. She sells her brand alongside decent illustrations, and less decent poetry…it does not bother me that this works for her, but it bothers me that she is celebrated as the greatest poetess since — confessional, no? Let’s say Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. Vapid is not for me, either — but that probably does not come as a surprise.
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Yes. My poetic judgement of her is hopelessly entangled with my resentment of her $tunning succe$$ .
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