Digital Choirs: Rupi Kaur and the Multiple, Theatrical Poetess

Digital Choirs:Rupi Kaur and the Multiple, Theatrical Poetess Caolan Madden (bio) To describe the Punjabi-Canadian poet and artist Rupi Kaur as "a trending poetess of Instagram," as Sasha Kruger does in a recent essay, is to foreground the insistent femininity of her work and its popularity: Kaur has over four million Instagram followers and, according to her website, eleven million copies of her books have been sold. Kruger's description also reflects the work's transnational circulation, its modular marketability, its engagement with gender, race, and empire, and the sprawling replication of words and images across different media—all characteristics we have come to associate with the nineteenth-century Poetess. In fact, the way in which audiences most commonly experience Kaur's work—as a multiplying grid [End Page 186] of images in which squares containing Kaur's drawings and text are interspersed with images of Kaur herself—helps us recognize that the tradition in which Kaur's work participates has always figured the Poetess as multiple and theatrical. Nineteenth-century critics frequently imagined the Poetess in terms of a "choir" of costumed, gesturing women—using visual, spatial imagery that goes beyond the familiar metaphor of dramatic voice to invoke the lavish materiality, publicity, and spectacle of the Victorian theatre as it was actually staged. (As Carole Gerson reminds us in her forum essay on Pauline Johnson, many Poetess figures gave highly theatrical public performances of their work.) The image of a stage crowded with costumed Poetesses appears in the gently satirical 1827 poem "The Crowning of the British Living Poetesses," which, unlike the famous crowning of the Poetess in Madame de Staël's Corinne, features multiple Poetess performers, including Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans, each distinguished by a different elaborate costume, all performing together; it returns in Henry Fothergill Chorley's 1845 boast that "no land has a choir of Poetesses like ours" (79) and, much later, in Germaine Greer's 1995 complaint that the "poetess's stride is encumbered by a train of esses" (36). We are familiar with the myth of the Poetess's solitary suffering; contemporary scholars working in Poetess studies describe her as the Poetess and grant her that gendered third-person singular pronoun. The susurration of those endless –esses, however, reminds us that there is not one set of petticoats rustling behind us but hundreds and thousands of what Tricia Lootens calls "Poetess performers" (4) stepping forth in a costume that has never really been intended for solo performance. The collective, public aspect of Poetess theatricality allows us to see new ways in which Poetess performers imagined their relationship to community formation, social life, and political activism. It also widens our understanding of the generic conventions that informed Poetess performance, suggesting that the Poetess figure's supposed "emptiness" paradoxically teems with countless, variously embodied figures.1 In fact, many Poetess poems that do not immediately read as dramatic in form—that, in fact, read as insistently lyric—invoke theatricality through the figure of the theatrical tableau: the moment when the action freezes and actors, props, and audience become formally equivalent.2 The insistent replication of bodies and objects within Hemans's Records of Woman, for example, produces the effect of an assemblage of performing female figures, an effect intensified by framing lyric or dramatic poems with generically diverse para-texts. The narrator of Hemans's "Imelda" asks of the corpses of Imelda and her lover: "were such things for the grave?" and then provides a staggering inventory of things: parts of the body proper (Imelda's "pale graceful arms," "marble brow," and "sweet eyelids"), objects decorating it ("long braids of pearl," "fiery gems"), and bodily traces such as hair, tears, or drops of blood [End Page 187] (lines 112–20). This imagery recalls Poe's notorious aestheticization of "the death of a beautiful woman"—but it is also a tableau, a construction that recurs throughout Records of Woman to suggest an overwhelming proliferation of feminine figures. In the 1870s, poet and dramatist Augusta Webster imagined the poem as a public, three-dimensional space, describing the "poetic imagination" as one that perceives "the sensations we receive simultaneously—as existing in space...

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