/lit/ - Literature

I’ve been a poetryfag my whole life ever since I read Song of Myself when I was eleven or twelve. Naturally I decided to pursue an MFA at U of T. My second semester, I took the highest level course they’d let me with only intro levels under my belt. It was LIT 310. The professor was Rupi Kaur, who I had never heard of before then. This is what that course was like:

On the first day, Ms. Kaur walked in wearing massive glasses with no lenses in them, she was draped in a burgundy satin sheet thing and wearing burlap sandals (yes, burlap). She wrote her name on the board with a hyphen in front of it and the ‘i’ in Rupi was a flower.

There were only like fifteen people in the class (all girls except me and one other guy). When she handed out the syllabus for the semester she only gave one to the girls then she said, “Guys, you’ll just have to watch and learn. Try to keep up.” The girls laughed. Me and the guy looked at each other like wtf? Then I laughed and she gave me a death stare and grabbed the dry-erase marker and started writing on the board:

Of colour
and kind, my women
but without men
without men
And without wo
I write this to you
so
you know
So you know
-rupi kaur

And beside it she scribbled the face of a woman frowning and a single tear below her eye. The second day in class she was wearing a literal curtain, like the translucent kind that hangs behind real curtains. she had a bumblebee hair clip and was wearing the same burlap sandals. She walked into the classroom, turned to face the board, wrote the word ‘FORME’ vertically and then turned to face us with her hands behind her back. “What is form?” she said, looking down her nose at us, scanning across the classroom. The guy beside me put his hand up and started answering, “It’s the structure and shape…” She interrupted him saying “Uh, we’d like to hear more diverse opinions, thanks.” Then she started answering her own question, muttering something about how society imposes form on us. Then she concluded by saying that poetry doesn’t have to be words. Most of the girls in the class were all airheads and when she said that poetry doesn’t have to be words, they all were like “Oooh, wow!”

Professor Kaur then drew a picture of a ladybug climbing up a blade of grass with the caption:
am
bit
ion

That's when I was done. I excused myself and transfered faculties. No joke, like a month later I was cutting through the arts building to get to a history lecture and I saw her teaching an introduction to drawing class.