The final play of the Life Bracket in round one features the Insta-poet Rupi Kaur, who has taken poetry to best-selling heights no one thought possible. Billy Collins sold well for a poet but Rupi Kaur sells millions of books. The Insta-poets, those poets who write very short poems on social media, account for about half of poetry book sales today.
But are epigrams, or little, cute, wise sayings, poetry?
Well, yes.
Because once High Modernism was allowed to say what poetry is, the game is over, and there are no more rules.
“The Red Wheel Barrow” by W.C. Williams, was critically praised (along with Pound’s haiku-like “In the Station at the Metro”) by the respected, highbrow, academic New Critics, in their much-used textbook, Understanding Poetry (several editions kept it current from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s) and not one academic that I’m aware of ever objected to that piece of Insta-crap. Williams belonged to the Modernist clique of Pound, Eliot, and Moore, so “The Red Wheel Barrow” was good.
And if the “The Red Wheel Barrow” is good, why isn’t Rupi Kaur good?
Lots of academics say Rupi Kaur is “shallow,” and perhaps she is, but why doesn’t anyone think “The Red Wheel Barrow” is shallow?
The pundits stand around in speechless awe before any thing (one thinks of that silly “plums” poem) by William Carlos Williams, and yet, Rupi Kaur, the academics are certain, is “shallow.”
There is a difference, of course, between, an “imagist” poem like The Red Wheel Barrow, which doesn’t “say” anything, and an Instagram poem which does “say something”—and therefore can easily be measured as “shallow.”
The secret to saying nothing, is that no one can say you are “shallow,” and the highbrows in academia may even embrace you.
But then why doesn’t everyone write Red Wheel Barrow poems all the time which say absolutely nothing?
Is it because it’s a joke, like Duchamp’s toilet, that only works once?
But then why does William Carlos Williams get to tell it?
Did William Carlos Williams invent “not saying anything?”
Didn’t haiku come first?
As any dunce knows, the best poetry exists in that middle realm between saying absolutely nothing (with a wheel barrow) and saying everything, in that fully and absolutely neat way an epigram does.
This is why poems need to be a certain length. They should be neither too short, nor too long; they should not say nothing, but they should not say too much. To be quite simple about it.
This March Madness tournament is based on brevity—for philosophical reasons, and by which these philosophical dispatches by Scarriet exist. We do hope you are enjoying the play.
Anyway, if you don’t like Rupi Kaur, blame High Modernism. If the “The Red Wheel Barrow,” which says nothing, is allowed, then why shouldn’t a poem just as brief, which says a little more than nothing, be allowed?
Rupi Kaur’s “i am not street meat i am homemade jam” faces off against this by Kim Gek Lin Short, from a poem published by The American Poetry Review, called “Playboy Bunny Swimsuit Biker:”
“If truth be told/the theft began/a time before/that summer day.”
The child of the Wheel Barrow v. a playboy bunny swimsuit on a bike.
We understand immediately what Rupi is saying: She’s “homemade jam”—she’s authentic and organic. She’s not “street meat”—crassly selling herself. Which is a great thing to boast about, after all.
We know what Kim Gek is saying, though we don’t know exactly what she is saying, but we do love the perfect iambic rhythm.
Kim Gek Lin Short wins.
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Next in the Life Bracket Round One Play:
June Gehringer — “I don’t write about race,/ I write about gender,/ I once killed a cis white man,/ and his first name/ was me.”
vs.
Alec Solomita — “All of the sky is silent/Even the jet shining/like a dime way up high”