Rupi Kaur: Destroyer of (Literary) Worlds

Profilicity as a new path forward for Poetry

The poet Rupi Kaur photographed by Baljit Singh

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Rupi Kaur’s book of poetry milk & honey has sold over three million copies. That’s six zeroes. 

When Kaur says in her poem titled “kaur/a woman of sikhi” that “the name kaur/makes me a free woman” she is declaring a number of things. First and foremost, within the context of milk & honey she is declaring, without a hint of irony, her identification with the role of the poet; words are assumed to have a weight and power that should be respected, something which is rarely found within the academic poetry industry.

By contrast, Billy Collins, the second most popular English-language poet (a distant second) wrote in his book The Trouble With Poetry that “…the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry…”

Collins is a former U.S. Poet laureate who has won a Mark Twain Award for humor in Poetry (haha) and is a professor with a Ph.D. in, yes, Romantic Poetry. He made his literary name with a type of well-written, wry poem that delights in delightful surprises and occasionally flirts with profundity. However, when given a choice, Collins will sooner lure you over to the hot dog stand owned by a pirate than lead you to the sublimity of a midnight tryst by a waterfall. 

If Kaur declares, “I’m a poet!” with her hands on her hips, then Collins says, “I’m a poet” over a glass of chardonnay with a wink. And “with a wink” is doing a lot of work in that last sentence. 

Plenty of digital ink has been spilled over the quality of the young (30) Kaur’s work, and undoubtedly Collins is the superior poet and writer, but for my purposes, I’m not really interested in that. I’m interested in the six zeroes.

To help us understand the six zeroes, we’ll turn our attention to the work of Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio, who co-authored the book You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. Moeller and D’Ambrosio (hereby M&A), professors of philosophy teaching in China, have developed a illuminating concept—profilicity. They take as their starting point the work of literary critic Lionel Trilling, specifically his work Sincerity and Authenticity. They refer to sincerity and authenticity, and their own addition, profilicity, as forms of “identity technologies.”

To get to Kaur’s zeroes we first must get to profilicity, and to get to that we must briefly touch on sincerity and authenticity.

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Sincerity, Authenticity, & Profilicity

M&A define sincerity as “a mental and social method of achieving identity based on sincere role enactment,” such as but not limited to one’s familial or religious role: mother, father, son, daughter, Protestant, Catholic, Sikh. In a society that stresses sincerity, you are expected to act out these roles to the best of your ability and to accept that your performance will be evaluated and corrected, if necessary, by the family unit, which itself is nested within an explicitly religious community framework.  

Authenticity, a more recent development, sees sincerity’s emphasis on duty to one’s role as, if not outright oppressive, then at least antagonistic to one’s ability to express one’s “true self.” One’s role in society is a mask that the authentic individual must break free from. It is a hindrance to being recognized by other authentic individuals who have rejected their allotted portion in life in favor of “finding one’s calling” or “becoming independent.” If you are over the age of 30 you were born into and came of age in this age of authenticity. “A regime of authenticity requires constant concern with and emphasis on uniqueness, creativity, and autonomy,” writes M&A. “One must not only strive for these values but also voice one’s support for them.”

This finally brings us to profilicity: profile building as identity building. Let’s go straight back to M&A for some heavy lifting: 

A profile is public. Accordingly, under conditions of profilicity, morality is, similar to sincerity, first concerned with performance rather than with what may be hidden behind its surface. What counts is what is seen, and importantly, what is seen as being seen. The power of profiles is improved by sharing opinions and judgments.

Originality is secondary to complying with one’s audience(s) who hold the keys to likes, subscribes, and affirming comments, which in turn affirms one's identity. On a profile, the surface is as deep as it goes, if you can forgive the phrase. For this reason, those of a certain age see profilicity as "inauthentic." M&A draw from the sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s concept of second-order observation. Under conditions of profilicity, “we do not simply look at people or issues directly but rather how they are seen publicly by others.”

So, we create images of ourselves for this second-order observation. But these images must be complemented by messaging. We'll ask M&A to put the cherry on top of our little sketch of their concept of profilicity:

Morality has commonly been understood in terms of being or doing good. Under conditions of profilicity, it is becoming increasingly clear that another definition may be more pertinent. Here, morality consists largely in communicating what is right. Or we might alternatively put it that in profilicity, what we say is the morally most visible and significant aspect of what we are and what we do.

As the most passing acquaintance with online social dynamics will demonstrate, the public perception of “who we are” can change as rapidly as it does radically. The sudden ostracization of J.K. Rowling by large swathes of her fan base for speaking out against a cultural shibboleth shows how profiles can be damaged by communicating what is “wrong.”

Note the language:

Yes, I am darkmode-pilled as they say

M&A note problems with each of these “identity technologies.” Sincerity being prone to a suffocating fundamentalism, authenticity to a destructive hyper-individualism, and profilicity to an exhausting impetus to constantly update one’s profile across multiple platforms. There are other critcisms as well; I highly recommend the book and Moeller's Youtube channel: Carefree Wandering.

OK. Now we can talk about those six zeroes.

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Kaur as Pioneer of Poetic Profilicity

Born in Punjab to a Sikh family that emigrated to Canada, Kaur was raised by her stay-at-home mother and trucker father. After having little success publishing her work with magazines and journals, she self-published her book milk & honey herself in 2014, selling 10,000 copies. After growing a sizable social media following, first on Tumblr and then on Instagram, milk & honey was re-released by Andrews McNeel Publishing to soon become a #1 New York Times Bestseller.

The master at work. A snapshot of Kaur’s IG feed. It follows the Insta-poet convention of alternating photos and poems. Extra points for the kangaroo.

Simply put, Kaur’s success flows from an unironic adoption of the role of poet (sincerity), a rejection of her immigrant parents’ old world expectations (authenticity), and her performative documentation of these conflicting “identity technologies” through her profile (profilicity).

The ideal role of the poet is certainly up for debate. For simplicity, let’s say the poet should delight and instruct and leave it at that. But we can say with certainty that traditionally, when examining a poem, we would consider not only the text but the poet and the poet’s audience as well in any analysis. It is beyond the scope of this present essay, but we can also state with certainty that within the 20th century, we saw the exclusion of the poet and their audience as considerations, instead turning solely to the examination of the text “in itself.”

To briefly return one more time, M&A write about the “general peer,” the audience to which profiles are addressed:

Unlike in sincerity, where those whom one knows best are in the privileged position to confirm one’s identity, in profilicity those whom one does not know personally count the most…the general peer is anonymous and in this sense supposedly objective, in a way.

Kaur’s milk & honey ends with a page titled, “a love letter from me to you” which is de facto a direct address to this general peer. She thanks the reader “for being tender with the most delicate part of me.” and says “i would be nowhere and nothing if it were not for you” and that “you’ve helped me become the woman i wanted to be.” 

I don’t have any hard data on this, but I think it is almost certainly the case that well over 90% of Kaur’s audience is female.

Here are the other works of poetry that were recommended to me when I purchased milk & honey:

Notice anything?

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s Substack

After Babel

, which focuses on the ill-effects of social media, recently addressed why he believes young liberal women in particular are struggling with mental health (Moeller actually responded directly and productively to Haidt with a video). This is Kaur’s primary audience.

We might say that instead of the more traditional “delight and instruct,” Kaur sees her role as to “delight and heal.” Her poems often reference sexual abuse, struggles with mental health, and general heartbreak, with clichéd affirmations that healing is possible (if one is true to oneself): "the world/gives you/so much pain/and here you are/making gold out of it"

This is delivered mostly in fragmentary lines universally devoid of meter, perfectly tailored to the attention span of a general peer raised on social media, and wholly oblivious to traditional English verse. There’s also poems about smoochin’.

Kaur’s default is to take authenticity and pass it through the sieve of profilicity to encourage her audience:

Poem from milk and honey

She is writing for a much, much larger audience than the poetry business world (poets writing for poets) and is delivering the goods, if not in poetic achievement, then at least in providing delight and succor to those in the throes of a painful transition from one age (authenticity) to another (profilicity). She can connect to her audience more effectively because of her skillful use of profilicity. After all, poets well-known in recent memory such as Allen Ginsberg and Maya Angelou were better known for their public profiles than for their poems.

In interviews, Kaur presents as pleasant, empathetic, and thoughtful and is obviously an attractive woman, which certainly helps. She recently wrapped up a world tour performing her work and has her own Amazon special. The young Canadian is approaching the upper echelons of cultural significance, whatever one may think of her poetry. As I've written about in my post on Edna St. Vincent, people don't just want poems, they want poets and all the mystique that once entailed.

I've personally found the above trifold model incredibly useful in navigating many different cultural developments. As an Orthodox Christian I hope to identify first and foremost with Christ and the Church, which puts me squarely within the framework of sincerity. Of course, I was raised within a cultural milieu that stressed authenticity (which is anathema to Orthodox Christianity) and I am actively building a profile here through Silver Door. We are all, one way or another, enmeshed in these different modes.

As a poet, I see this new digital landscape which is dominated by profilicity, and which deemphasizes authenticity, as an opportunity for a more vibrant and productive artistic environment.

Profiles aren’t going away. Poetry isn’t going away. If they even know any academic poets (they don't) the public doesn’t like them. Rupi Kaur has a public that loves her.

Poets should take note.

Thanks, Rupi.