About Instapoetry

Pictured: Poet Rupi Kaur

(I penned this to the same college student, this time in response to questions about the Instapoetry movement. Apparently he uses excerpts-- with attribution-- in a college newspaper.)

Change in any art is necessary to keep it fresh and alive. What's happening with the success of Rupi Kaur and others like her is a return to extreme simplicity in form, and to simple, basic emotion. To language's roots, in a sense. The poems are fresh and readable, and so are drawing readers to online poetry. The short, clear style is made for the digital age-- at least, as you imply, for these still-early days of the digital age. So, yes, Rupi Kaur is the face of poetry now. 

Can it last? I don't think so, unless it evolves. It's too simple, and will quickly become monotonous. What looks new and fresh today won't look so fresh a few years from now when it's been done over and over. And over, with little variety. Its utter simplicity leaves little room for variety. It's the kind of poetry (I won't call it verse; it's not verse) which anyone can write. Which means everyone will write it, and the world will be flooded with Rupi Kaur knockoffs until we're drowning in them and people cry out, "Enough!" Are Rupi Kaur and her colleagues talented enough to evolve their art? Or are they one-hit wonders who'll be writing and reciting the same tunes ten or twenty years from now? They have a penchant for promotion. That's obvious. Is that enough?

Their flaw is they use none of the effective tricks of poetry developed over centuries. Things like cadence, wordplay, the occasional (or not so occasional) rhyme. What some call euphony. Rupi Kaur stresses that her work draws on trauma and abuse. So did Sylvia Plath's. Plath's poems were extremely self-centered-- but they also used every tool in the poet's toolbox, which is why they've lasted-- why they're as strong now to read or listen to as when they were composed. 

The poetic art has fled from craft-- from the instinctive use of what some call craft-- since Plath's death, and much of the running away is from simple laziness. Academic poetry has put people to sleep for decades-- in part because it threw away rhyme and meter, elements of poetry which existed for a reason. Which existed because they helped the listener connect easily to the work-- aiding the mind in flowing into a work's rhythms and imagery. The best poetry expresses a joy in language itself-- which is why Shakespeare has lasted. It should be fun and exciting to recite. The work of the Instapoets is too simple to be fun and exciting to recite.

Still, what they're doing might be necessary to bring new people back to the art. The true innovators will be those who move strongly beyond Rupi Kaur and her peers-- who can build on the simplicity but give the new audiences the excitement of a more complex and passionate art. That's the trick. That's the task. That's the accomplishment to go after-- not to dismiss Instapoetry, but to surpass it. To top it at its own game by subtly and gently bringing back those long-scorned and forgotten tools of cadence and rhyme. Mixing them into the simple words and short works. Keeping the poems short but making them more powerful, more compressed. Creating poems which will simply engage the online reader-- but knock those readers out of their chairs with their power. That's what I'd like to see. If it can be imagined, it can be accomplished.

Karl Wenclas

Editor

New Pop Lit

www.newpoplit.com 

Nietzsche or Jesus?

I've been in a discussion of sorts with a friend about the ideas of Nietzsche, which I see as regrettably postmodern, the cause of great misery last century. This friend loaned me a book by Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze? isn't that an energy drink?) containing an essay which attempts to explain Nietzsche to the lay reader. My reaction to the essay follows.

There are two layers to Deleuze's essay, what he says, and what he's really saying.

What Deleuze is really saying is that Nietzschean philosophy is a room in a broken house. The room has large fissures in it. Deleuze, the landlord, is trying to plaster over those fissures.

To do so he has to try, in typical postmodern fashion, to redefine terms. In postmodern land, words never mean what they seem to mean, but something else. "The strong," "the weak," "master," "slave"-- the words when used by Nietzsche don't mean what you think. In some cases they might mean the opposite. It's a convolution necessary to explain Nietzsche to the wary reader. "Will to power," then, doesn't mean "will to power." Or it does, but not exactly. Any relation of "Triumph of the Will" to "will to power" is accidental. A misinterpretation.

What Deleuze is saying is that Nietzsche's ideas, at best, are subject to a lot of misinterpretation.

Nietzsche was famously hostile to God and Christianity. It seems to me that he (or Deleuze) gets the concept wrong when he calls Christianity a religion of death. Talk about misinterpretation! What made Christianity remarkable was that it burst on the scene as a religion of life. It's two biggest holidays celebrate birth, and rebirth. Easter was the starting point of, and reason for, Christianity. Resurrection was the crux of its appeal.

The idea of resurrection went back far into ancient times. The fact of resurrection is fundamental to nature.

The pagan religions which Christianity displaced were more like cultures of death. There was little value placed on human life. Murder, infanticide, war, blood in the arena-- trivial things to the Roman Empire, whose prevailing ethos, in practice, was power, raw power, the unceasing glorification and promotion of power.

The crucifixion of a revolutionary named Jesus was a simple demonstration of that imperial power.

It's been said that the quick face-to-face encounter between Pontius Pilate and Jesus was a cosmic event. Representative of Caesar, personification of the mightiest and most ruthless empire known, meets insignificant peasant. "What is truth?" Pilate asks, as a true postmodernist for whom truth is relative and conditional. Truth to him is a manifestation of power.

Can we say that Pilate was "the strong" and Jesus "the weak"? I don't know. It might be a reach. (Have more energy drink.)

The encounter was cosmic because Jesus-- if only historically- transcended the bounds of time and space. The ultimate yin-yang; flipping strength and weakness. The unknown's tiny and powerless movement of the poor, the sick, the weak, would overturn Rome itself. An unbelievable happening. Inexplicable to this day.

Some of Nietzsche's ideas, like the "Last Pope," seem borrowed from, or influenced by, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.

Remember the debate between the two brothers? Just as Jesus "loses" to Pontius Pilate, Alyosha Karamazov doesn't prevail in the intellectual discussion against the pitiless atheistic logic of Ivan's tale. The Inquisitor represents power. Alyosha is a representative of Christ. He's not meant to win. He represents something other than intellect. His argument is on another level, from another realm. It's not even an argument. He just is. He represents humanity and what's best in humanity.

It's the genius of Dostoevsky that he not only presents the opposing side to his theme, but makes it overpowering.

One who enjoys the harsh poetry of Nietzsche shouldn't read Dostoevsky. There's no room in Nietzsche for pity and charity. Pity runs throughout The Brothers Karamazov, the author crying out on every other page for the powerless, the weak.

When I think about pity, about the strong and the weak, I think of another literary work, one that rivals Karamazov in emotional power and transcendent meaning, Shakespeare's King Lear.

Recall the plot: A clash of generational viewpoints. Lear is opposed by two of his daughters and their strong-willed husbands, who parallel in too-many ways the conscienceless postmodern yuppies of today. Disciplined, monied, ambitious-- outraged by Lear's drunken irresponsible merrymaking.

One of the son-in-laws-- Cornwall, the embodiment of casual evil-- fearing that an old friend of Lear's, Gloucester, has been in contact with the exiled king, gouges the man's eyes out. A truly horrific moment. One cannot but have pity while experiencing this scene. Do you recall what happens? One of Cornwall's nameless men, a servant, a nobody, in outrage and pity, stands up to the important nobleman and attempts to stop what he's doing. He's run through by Cornwall, but mortally wounds Cornwall in return. Most important is that he stands up, for the weak, for humanity, for the good, against pure conscienceless power. It's a great moment, because it's unexpected. It reveals selfless hope in a world of egoistic hopelessness. It shows that conscience-- pity, charity, goodness-- is never dead, even when the universe appears most brutal, most inhuman. It's a Christian moment. I don't believe Nietzsche would like it.