1. I'm sure this will drive a certain twitter readership insane, but I agree with this writer's assessment.
newrepublic.com/article/155930…
newrepublic.com/article/155930…
2. The passage that most strikes me is this: "Kaur’s verse is compact in part because she’s thinking within the parameters of a smartphone screen, which is not that radical when you consider that many poetic forms are about artificial constraint."
3. "Think of hers as an Oulipian project. I also feel she’s onto something: The canonical poetry most likely to endure the next century is the one that can fit comfortably within the glowing window we spend so much of our time gazing into."
4. I think this writer's assessment has already happened in American letters. Some of our brightest names do well in part because their work "fits" with technology and our tech reading habits. This doesn't make it automatically bad or their work aesthetically suspect
5. but it does signal a shift in the kinds of poems (and fiction) we are training ourselves to like and to read "well" as critics. This, as the article notes, has essentially always happened, since our reading has ever and always been shaped by technologies at hand.
6. But when we dismiss the aesthetic of Kaur, I think we are turning a blind eye to how ALL of us--"high art" poets & writers on down (and I include myself in this)--have had our aesthetics shaped, our syntax blunted, and our emotional gestures informed by our devices.
Let me also say this: The point here is not whether or not Kaur is good. That is beside the point. It is not Kaur herself per se but what Kaur represents that makes her the writer of the decade. She represents a new form of reading, and that form of reading has changed us all.
It has nothing to do with Kaur's actual words, but the ordering and dissemination of those words.
