Textual Poaching

For my remix, I took one of Rupi Kaur’s poems and covered all words but a few to create my own poem. It was fun, and significantly more difficult than I anticipated. I liked the end result because it isn’t something I would’ve ever come up with without the preemptive structure, but it is still original and creative in its own right. If the picture is hard to read, the poem is as follows:

            As a big one is thunder,

            I make meat to cut the crackle.

            I’d take your eyes.

            I am the whiskey

            With expectations.

I don’t like Ms. Kaur’s poetry. I don’t think it’s profound, or particularly thoughtful; I think it’s highly digestible, and therefore highly consumed. It’s a product of the internet, and historically the internet does not like poetry or literature because both those mediums take too much time and work. I also recognize the value in spreading poetry (one of the most inaccessible forms of artistic expression) through any means possible. It’s entirely possible that Ms. Kaur’s viral prose-with-a-higher-line-to-word-ratio has elicited interactions of the average internet user with poets like Robert Browning or Maya Angelou. But there’s a definite snobby, English-major part of me that says “this is not poetry and the conglomeration of art into things that are easy to read and require no thinking must cease.” So it’s a fine line. And I think it’s a line that is discussed (and perhaps resolved), albeit less angstily, in Barney’s essay.

I wonder about my connection with Ms. Kaur as a woman. I’m a creative writing minor, and I fight the good patriarchy fight like the rest of us (or best of us? Idk). I don’t believe in women tearing other women down, and I love a good “Women Support Women” t-shirt because I think the sentiment is so important! Shouldn’t I, as a fellow female writer, feel a kinship towards her? I do, at least a little bit. And I very much respect her popularity and wide-spread voice in a world that caters to white men, and she is neither white nor male. But also you can’t just say “this is good because I support women” because I really, really don’t think it’s good, I think it’s well-formatted trash. While I don’t have a neatly formed answer to this dilemma, I feel great about how it exists. These are exactly the kind of conversations I want my students to have if they remix something. I am poking fun, a bit, at Ms. Kaur through my remix. I think my poem is silly and weird and maybe ridiculous, but not nearly as ridiculous as her original work. That doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about how women’s literature has been received historically (which is to say not at all), or how literature and the internet have had little-to-no interaction in the past. I think this harkens back to Ms. Rao’s guiding words to her erstwhile students: you don’t have to like it, but you do need to respect the value it has in its own context.