Rupi Kaur Poems
December 5th, 2025
Photo: Zoe Romeu
Writer: Amany Sayed
Editor: Emily Cavero
The shortest poem ever published is a single letter. “M” by Aram Saroyan challenges boundaries and inspires the question: What even is a poem? If I asked you to define poetry, you might point to the features that distinguish it from other forms of writing: rhythm, heightened use of figurative language, the use of meter, etc. Dictionary definitions of the word “poetry” tend to limit what constitutes a poem. For example, prose poetry is an irregular form of poetry that doesn’t look like what we think of as a capital-P “Poem.” Even free verse poetry exists as a limiting form of what a poem can be. After all, when does a free verse poem stop being a poem and start simply being words on a page?
As a poet, I find myself coming back to the question of what defines poetry over and over again. If I want to write a poem, I must first know what it is. However, rather than coming to a conclusion, my perspective has grown wider and wider over the years as my exposure to irregular poetry has expanded and my preconceived notions have been disproven time and time again. The more poetry I read and attempt to write, the less I am sure anyone even has the right to define such an intimate, personal form of art.
In the past, I turned my nose up to a lot of what some might call “basic poetry.” A few years ago, I stumbled upon the TikTok-famous poet Rupi Kaur, who wrote the highly successful “Milk and Honey,” amongst other poetry anthologies. Curious, I read some of her work, only to find what I perceived as shallow, boring poems. To me at the time, Kaur’s writing was hardly “good enough” to be as revered as it was, and I haughtily rejected her work as real poetry. Looking back now, a lot of my criticism of Kaur stemmed from my own insecurities when it came to writing poetry. If I wrote something that didn’t rhyme well enough, or lacked a certain level of structure or originality that I’d mandated upon myself, I would be disappointed. It seemed unfair to me that Kaur’s poems, sometimes as short as two lines, were looked at so fondly, when I was going through such lengths to create a product I deemed worthy of being called a poem.
Last year, I took a course as a part of my path to gaining a Creative Writing capstone along with a Bachelor's in English. In the second half of the course, we focused on poetry, and while we learned meter, discussed figurative language, and experimented with conventional forms of poetry, a lot of the discussion we had focused on challenging what we even considered poetry in the first place. We read unconventional poetry – poems that were made up of book titles stacked on top of each other, letters in a graph format, even an interactive poem held within a custom google maps page. One of the most unique experimental pieces we looked at was "the sensation is without artifact” by Kelly Hoffer. Hoffer printed her poem on blue fabric in white ink, with certain portions of the poem appearing blurry and hard to read. Then, she cut the poem into strips and knit them together into a rectangle. You can still decipher some of the words, but it’s pretty difficult to go about reading it.
Is the final piece still a poem?
When my instructor posed this question to the class, I wasn’t sure how to answer. To this day, I’m not even sure there IS an answer. When it comes to art, I think it would be better appreciated if we stopped trying to define it and instead simply allowed it to exist as it is. Rupi Kaur’s poems might not be my favorite pieces of writing, and I might still not know what to make of Saroyan’s “M,” but that doesn’t give me the right to stop calling either of them poetry. As an English major, I look forward to expanding my repertoire of literature, and I promise to appreciate it in whatever form it comes in – whether written, painted, or knit.
