SINGAPORE – A poet on world tour is unheard of. For the most part, global live shows are reserved for bands, Cirque du Soleil and the occasional stand-up comedian.

But 30-year-old Canadian poet Rupi Kaur refuses to be constrained by literary expectations.

Marrying her short, simple verses popularised on Instagram with her spoken-word training, she has toured the world since 2016 in ever-expanding circuits, meeting her fans – who number more than 4.5 million – in countries from Brazil to New Zealand.

On April 4, she will put on a one-woman, one-night show at the 1,948-seat Esplanade Theatre, Singapore being her first stop in South-east Asia.

Though the second and third levels at the large venue will not be used, seats on the ground and first levels are selling fast, despite the $98 to $118 prices for tickets.

Kaur says: “Every time I post about other places that I’m performing in, my readers are so upset. They are like ‘Oh, you don’t pay any attention to us. You’re never going to come here.’ and I am like, ‘No, I want to do this.’”

About the idea of a poet on tour, she adds: “Poetry is such a universal, beautiful art form that everyone has a potential to fall in love with and, in my community, that is how poetry is seen and experienced.

“The idea of travelling the world to perform, it doesn’t seem so out of the box for me. It all just feels very organic.”

Born in Punjab, India, Kaur blindsided the publishing industry when she came out of nowhere to sell 1.4 million copies of her first book, Milk And Honey, in 2014.

Her enjambed, epigrammatic messages of female empowerment and self-love typed up against a white Instagram square found resonance with a new social media-savvy fan base – usually young girls – who liked that she spoke truth in a short and simple way.

A poem like “our backs/tell stories/no books have/the spine to/carry” is typically accompanied by a line illustration of a girl reading – something Kaur picked up while studying visual rhetoric during her rhetoric and professional writing undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Transferring her online popularity to real life, however, is a different proposition, especially because English is Kaur’s second language.

She emigrated to Canada at a young age, where she felt like “a complete alien in my classrooms” due to the language barrier, and was even thought by many of her classmates to be “mute”.

A teacher who championed books changed all that, and Kaur began writing poetry for her friends and crushes. This expanded into performing at local open-mic nights in 2009, where she spoke earnestly about issues surrounding sexual assault and racism.

“A lot of people believe that social media is the centre of my poetry because I have a very big following. But my poetry journey started long before that. It started on the stage,” Kaur says.

“I would get called to perform and the organisers would say, our event is about human rights or about mothers, for example. I would go home and I would write a brand new poem around that theme, and then I would perform it, come home and never look at that poem again.”

On a whole generation of Insta-poets – including Lang Leav, Yrsa Daley-Ward and Amanda Lovelace – having spawned from her writing, she says: “People expect me to be upset or something, but I just think it’s so incredible.

“There are probably more young poets, young people of colour, publishing poetry now than any other time in human history. If Milk And Honey and my journey have made that possible, I think it’s fantastic.”

Similarities among a now-generic and easily replicable type have not been without controversy.

In the course of her fame, Kaur has had to respond to accusations of plagiarism by African-American poet Nayyirah Waheed, who thought Kaur’s poems bore a resemblance to her own verses on Tumblr.

Kaur prefers to focus on her poetry’s generative power. “Throughout my world tour, people have been gifting me their own self-published collections of poetry. I swear to you, I come back home and I’m stacking all these books that my readers have published, and they fill my entire bookshelf.”

So, what can people expect at her show? Ninety minutes of long spoken-word poems scored with beautiful music produced with collaborators, Kaur says.

“Some of the poems are heavy, some of the poems are fun. When people think of poetry, they think that it’s going to be sad or serious or boring, especially the boyfriends who are being dragged to these shows.

“But then, they walk out just completely in love with the craft because I make it fun. We are going to go through so many emotions and stories together.”

Rupi Kaur World Tour

Where: Esplanade Theatre, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: April 4, 8pm
Admission: From $98
Info: str.sg/iZuh