how to act pretentious

 (This is completely unedited and has no structure of events in general. Just a jumble of my thoughts)

(Also the irony because I'll be critiquing on exactly that)

The title for this one would have been "why poems suck" but then that would just make me look really dumb, so I chose the wiser option.

My dislike for poems started somewhat in the early few months of 2020 for a variety of reasons.  Admittedly, I did kind of enjoy poems up till that point. Some of them being Keki N Daruwalla's Crossing of rivers; Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee, The Black Cat; Percy Bysshe Shelley's Queen Mab and some Yeats here and there. While I still enjoy most of these classics to date, I guess its the more recent poems that irk me more than anything. Unironically, maybe the biggest advantage about writing poems is that there's no set of rules that need to be followed. And then there's this perception surrounding poems which always blindly make it seem like everything is so deep, intellectual, etc.

When I say my dislike for poems started in the beginning of covid, I only have one person to blame. One of the biggest problems that comes with critiquing art is the lack of not being able to critique it without getting bashed left and right. There's always the discussion of objectivity and subjectivity of an art piece, what makes an artist good or bad and more importantly, who gets to decide it. I think people are so oblivious to the fact that art exists on the mere existence of both its subjectiveness and objectiveness and inherently lies on intent behind it. Reading Rupi Kaur and poets like her was a hard one for me mostly  because everyone around me seemingly enjoyed her work, going even as far to call her one of the best  poets of this generation. And the internet does not like it when you subject a women's piece of work with harsh criticism because then you'll be called a misogynist, anti-feminist, something along those lines almost making it impossible to differentiate what's good and bad. I'm all up for woman upliftment but who's going to tell them that not everything under the sky is made to be brilliant? 

Before I make any further statements, I have nothing against Rupi Kaur. From the few interviews I've watched of hers, I can just see how captivating she is, and for all the women who will come after her, will more likely have an easier path than she ever did. 

Maybe its the fact that her more recent poems seem like a high school, around the lunch table conversation.

Reading Milk and Honey I could see some real potent from the way she handled sensitive issues, always hitting at the right place even though from time to time I felt the language itself had a weak footing. Words when framed right gives a seriousness in a way tik tok captions don't because its the lack of thought put. And so when I compare her more recent works, it’s so clear that she has a specific audience in mind. While she's completely free to do whatever she wants to with her poetry, its the mind numbing contrast between trying to sound deep and yet at the same time, an instant tumblr thing you update before you go to sleep. The content is all about seriousness yet the writing style is anything but serious. Like many things on the internet, it’s all about "in the moment". 

Here's some stuff:

I tried making sense of whatever this is and obviously this is just a single idea of what she presents her style to be like but nonetheless it just seems like a big joke to call this poetry when it’s just merely few words pasted together 

This one’s more tricky to handle… I contemplated for a while whether to put this one in here due to the mere nature of the content because while the topic itself is sensitive, I’ve seen Rupi Kaur do better. With her harsh yet methodical way of portraying trauma throughout her career, she clearly set herself different in a way I haven’t seen in poetry in a while.

So when I see a sentence so mediocre as the above one, it’s makes me question the whole purpose of subjecting a piece of work. Where does the distinguishable lie? Where does the opinion lie?

This started with my hatred for poems, and yes I haven’t been able to read any without analysing it over and over again. I’ve already seen the eyes being compared to the sky and the lips to the apple. I’ve seen the relation between the soul and a body and the lovers who are still possibly standing outside in the rain. Is repetition only bound to poems? Not really. But I thought otherwise.