Rupi Kaur’s Singapore pit stop a tepid mix of might-have-beens

Rupi Kaur – Live in Singapore

Now/Live Esplanade Theatre Tuesday, 8pm

Canadian poet Rupi Kaur is now the most popular poet who has ever lived: Her self-published debut Milk And Honey (2014) – as she reminds her audience on Tuesday – has outsold Homer’s The Odyssey by more than 10 to one and counting.

So it was an anticlimax that her one-woman, one-night performance at the Esplanade Theatre was only slightly more than half-attended.

Coming off the back of a sold-out show at the Sydney Opera House, the 30-year-old poet came on stage 10 minutes after 8pm, as if waiting for a crowd that never came.

Dressed in a shimmering off-shoulder gown the colour of fire, Kaur is a poet who arguably reaches too liberally for the flame. Here she is a woman set on fire who becomes the fire, there a conflagration burning the male ego.

Her every conjuring, however, was met with whoops and affirmations by her adoring fans, some of whom had flown in from Dubai, Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia for this first South-east Asia show.

They braved a $98 price tag, which meant the demographic of the crowd was mostly over 30 years old and expatriate-heavy– surprising, given her popularity with young girls mostly.

This is not your usual poetry recital. Early on, Kaur tells the audience to do away with snaps – the de rigueur way of showing approval in a spoken word performance – and have no qualms about interrupting and responding to her poetry in any manner they please.

A bare stage where only a microphone stand and a cocktail table have been placed is the set for her to make a performance of intensely personal moments: about depression, a first date with an obnoxious crypto-currency bro, finding out that this same man has been cheating on her, emigrating from India to Canada at a young age after the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

All are fertile sources of inspiration for her poems that range from five lines to five minutes. The abrupt brevity of some of these pieces means she has to step away from the microphone to let the audience know a poem is over and it is time for applause.

Judgments about her poetry aside, it is easy to see why she is well liked. Kaur is confident, funny and scarily relatable, effortlessly holding the stage by stitching her poems together with smooth banter.

She quotes Desmond Tutu’s “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor” when talking about post-breakup group chats.

Accompanied by gentle melodies layered with the sounds of waves and drums, her verses are given a new dimension that is absent in the spare Instagram post that is her trademark.

Spoken, her cadences flow and her skin-deep metaphors become a sort of strength: easy to follow, a mix between a friend telling a story and lo-fi rap, and requiring only semi-attention to feel its rhythms and be carried away on the tide.

But this is also where her poetry grows weary. Sometimes, it feels too manipulative – her immigrant parents working hard is the “most artistic thing” she has ever seen.

Extended metaphors go nowhere. In Broken English, her mother’s accent is “thick like honey”, a richness which should not be stomped upon, but which should also be hung up on walls in museums next to Dali and Van Gogh.

It is also weird when three-line poems are treated like hits. Kaur trots them out one after another like mantras or Bible verses – or as if speaking a sentence – to fans whom she knows have come specifically to hear these.

I Want To Apologise To All Women was especially feted, despite it being an unoriginal desire to recognise in women qualities beyond their beauty, expressed in rather banal enjambed prose.

Still, Kaur has cultivated a tolerant and receptive audience, for who else is treated with such grace by a paying crowd while talking about not being able to wait for her performance to end so she can go home to see her friends?

And how to explain one of her poems about finding out that her boyfriend is cheating on her, where her reluctance to take the woman’s word for it and her brutal rejection of the woman’s advances to do something about it together are met with applause?

Kaur makes the point that in her Sikh community, poetry is meant to be accessible, spoken by even those who cannot read for various rites of passages.

Here she has perhaps found common ground with Homer: The epics of the ancient Greek author or authors are believed to have been transmitted orally before being set down on the page.

In her meteoric career, Kaur has reversed this memory-to-paper process to obvious international success.

That the world is now ready for a brown woman to speak her truth is something surely deserving of celebration on its own. One can only hope poetry does not suffer as a result.