Life of a Lady Poet: Put Down On Paper

Rupi Kaur: The Poet Every Woman Needs to Read

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It's almost like an anxiety building up in my stomach. This buildup is basically all the ideas my mind has turned into poetry over the past few days because I get inspiration through my interactions with the world. And so when I'm out there, going through my day, the poems are generating themselves and if I'm not writing them out, then they're building up inside me.

And if I don't get to a laptop, or some pen and paper right away, it almost feels like they might rot inside of me. And so then I'll go somewhere quiet. And a pair of headphones.

A Close Reading of "I Cannot Live With You"

I give myself time to sink into his voice and his words. The words get in the way of the writing. I will open up my text edit document. The same one I always use. And I just begin.

Until it feels like I've gotten out everything that needed to be written and then I will put it away. And come back to it with fresh eyes some other time. What prompted you to share your writing? Back in November of , what moved me to share was the idea that I was tired of being quiet. I felt like, for the first time ever, what I had to say was so much more powerful than my fear of what people might think. It was almost as though I had no choice. It seemed more important for me to express solidarity with women going through similar struggles than to continue being that "polite, shy, quiet girl".

What was it like to have your poems published? To have those poems published was like a dream come true. The way a small child might dream of visiting Disneyland, I dreamed of writing books. Never did I think my poems would become that. But to see the book come to fruition was such a graceful blessing. One that's filled me with so much compassion I'm left softer and kinder for the world.

Your illustrations really add to the poems, did you study art at all or is it just something you enjoy doing? I haven't had the opportunity to study visual art but it was always my first love when it came to artistic expression. I started drawing and experimenting with visual art when I was 5. We were moving around a lot. Being that my parents and I were immigrants to Canada, I didn't have the most lavish life growing up. So we couldn't take trips and I didn't have the toys the other kids had, so drawing was my playtime along with going to the library of course.

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I created the world I wanted to live in on paper. But once I took up writing in , I stopped drawing all of a sudden. Because I was focusing so much time on improving my writing, I told myself I had no time for art. Eventually, this made me a little upset. The fact that I had left my first love behind cause I had found another passion just didn't seem right to me.

So in January , I had an idea. Why not mix the two mediums? And that's how the illustrations came about. I'd explain the style of illustrations I use with my poems as "childlike, and semi-scribbled". They are simple enough that they don't take away from the poetry.

I chose this style because it created juxtaposition with the words. Where the poetry was very serious, very mature, and dealt with some hear wrenching topics, the free-handedness of the illustrations expressed this feeling of innocence. To show that the subject of the poem is experiencing and dealing with things you wouldn't wish upon another person.

I'd like to think that when paired together they might almost leave the reader feeling slightly uncomfortable. Your poems celebrate being a woman despite the fact that there are many challenges to being a woman. The intricacy of the rhyme leaves "sustenance" as unrhymed, underscoring that "White Sustenance" does not nourish. Incidentally, early publications of the poem replaced "white" with "pale" as if softening the conclusion that she reaches by modifying the degree of her language; "pale sustenance" seems somehow more sustaining.

However, even as she closes the argument, it opens up a little, because in this despair she has found a kind of sustenance, however undernourishing it is. There is something holy about this kind of despair, and "white" seems also to be "heavenly," as if in losing her hope for the afterlife, she has found a new earthly devotion to replace it, and then elevated it to celestial levels. This stanza is notably the first time she uses the word "We," capitalized for emphasis, and creates a paradox where "meet apart" seems possible, or at least more possible than any of the other alternatives she has rejected throughout the poem.

She claims that the door is just "ajar" but then compares it to oceans, making "ajar" as wide open as the earth itself, and then linking it to prayer, or hope. In a final touch, she ends the poem with an elongated endstop, printed as a dash, and whether it is meant to be "ajar" or more definitively shut is as unanswerable as the final question of the poem.

While poems are not typically thought of as arguments, the Renaissance tradition demanded rigorous logic and quality of thought rather than simple sentimentality—even when writing about love. For example, in a "carpe diem" poem, the poet is trying to find inventive ways to convince a virgin to "make much of time.

Short-ish poems (10-15 lines)

Posted January 01, Type Essays. The Elements and Function of Poetry.

When Two Poets Fall in Love. Introduction to The Wedge. The Heresy of the Didactic. The poem begins with a sense of impossibility: In the second part of the poem, Dickinson imagines that the alternative to living with someone is dying with them, but that also has been denied to her: In the third section of the poem, Dickinson imagines the final judgment, and how it might be overwhelmed by her earthly love: In the fourth section of the poem, the speaker describes why she cannot be in hell with her lover: The rose is a rose, And was always a rose.

The dear only knows What will next prove a rose. You, of course, are a rose — But were always a rose. Is that Eric Garner worked for some time for the Parks and Rec. Horticultural Department, which means, perhaps, that with his very large hands, perhaps, in all likelihood, he put gently into the earth some plants which, most likely, some of them, in all likelihood, continue to grow, continue to do what such plants do, like house and feed small and necessary creatures, like being pleasant to touch and smell, like converting sunlight into food, like making it easier for us to breathe.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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