rupi kaur shot to fame with her pithy instagram poems on themes like love migration and womanhood the canadabased indianorigin poets first book of poetry milk and honey sold more than 3m copies the 25yearold has recently come out with her second the sun and her flowers she spoke to kim arora about her writing processyou say you were told countless times by publishers that poetry doesnt sell what do you think they missedi think things had been one way for a really long time and people had just accepted that when i went up to my professor and told her hey i want to publish a book of poetry she was like oh no no no how do i help you and then she suggested that maybe instead of a book i could send some poems to a magazine or literary journal or something like that that wasnt very good because i felt like i was taking apart the book and throwing things at different walls hoping they would stick i feel like it only made sense when it was put in this particular way points to a copy of milk and honey because this is a body of work when you take the body parts and you split them and throw them you cant see the entire picturea lot of uncharitable things have been said about instapoets as a trendsetter in this genre what would you say to criticswhenever there is something new happening there is resistance to it i always get asked whether this form of poetry is just a fad and i say only time will tell but i hope not i think we have really pushed it into the mainstream there is always so much attention given to short stories fiction nonfiction poetry has been around since the beginning of humanity so why isnt it part of the mainstream as well hopefully it can beif you had been a writer when the internet did not exist where would your writing beit would be on the stage before i went online i was performing i would write a poem go to an event and in front of 600 people i would share the poem put it away and never look at it again and during the next open mic i would write a new one and never really revisit old work my friends were getting so upset because they were like oh my god we love that piece only 600 people have heard it youre ridiculous were gonna come with a camera make a video and post it online so thats how i entered the online space but for me although i love that space the stage is my favourite place in the entire worldyou say you write in lowercase to mimic the logic of the gurmukhi script that doesnt have capitalisation because you cant write poetry in it is that something youre working onso much of my writing comes from the fact that i am