It was a poetry recital and it wasn’t. Yes, of course, there was a poet on stage, and an audience that filled. The atmosphere was more like a concert by a musical star, a fan phenomenon, which does not detract from the artist or his work. Now, that also means that aspects such as accreditations for photographers go through filters that are not common in the literary world. The image suffers.
With an audience made up mostly of young girls, but not only, and a good part of apparently diverse origins, rupi kaur – he writes in lowercase by Sikh tradition – stood on stage to applause and expectation. To start, she asked the audience how many had been to a poetry recital before. Perhaps a dozen hands go up. She promises everyone that “we’ll have a great time, we’ll laugh, maybe we’ll cry, we’ll do it all.” “I love doing magic with the audience. What do I mean? Give energy to each other”. And it was two hours of magic for the public, who clapped and tapped their feet on a few poems. “This way you have given me five more years of life,” she said gratefully.
It was a poetry show with appeals to sisterhood and female and human empowerment, with presentations of the poems in the key of what they call stand up. She talked about depression and recited her path through therapies, meditation, yoga, coaching and books on depression, but you have to move “toward the sun, leaving the shadow behind.”
And then she went over the stories with the men, “not all of them, in agreement, but almost”, and the public identified with her. Or that poem with an orgasm, which she almost no longer says on stage but she wanted to say it, and since she didn’t have it memorized, she asked and found someone in the audience who had a copy of her first book.
But there were also moments for the story of his immigrant family, Sikh pride and how “a bridge between two worlds” feels, or the memory for Aylan, the boy who was found dead on a beach.
And he remembered friendship, or how he started self-publishing, the worst thing he could do in the literary world, they told him, but of course, “when a man makes the impossible possible he is a genius or a hero, but if a woman does it he is suspicious” . Because they told him that his “is not poetry because many people like it.” The millions of his readers will not agree, and it is likely that the poetry, and the recital, have made them enter a new world, closer to the emotions and more empowered. Today, he returns to the stage at the Apollo.
Catalan version, here
