Annotated Bibliography
Kaur, Rupi. Milk and Honey. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2015. Print
Section 1: Summary & “Reading For”
Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry by Rupi Kaur that is split into four different sections, each dealing with a different aspect of her life, femininity, sexuality, and her relationship with pain on varying levels. The collection of poetry deals a lot with pain and trauma, which raises the question: How does past trauma affect a person in the present? The first section of this book is mostly negatively charged and deals with the childhood trauma that the narrator has experienced. Kaur states how her experiences in the past has affected her in the present. She uses poetry as a way of telling her story.
Kaur draws a lot on appealing the aesthetic emotion of her audience. As described by Robert McKee in “Structure and Meaning,” “When an idea wrap itself around an emotional charge, it becomes all the more powerful, all the more profound, all the more memorable… Life on it’s own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos but aesthetic emotion harmonized awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.” (111). Since this work is based off of actual events that the author has experienced, it could be said that this was her attempt to harmonize the confusion and chaos of life into cohesion.
The first section of the book, “The Hurting” deals with Kaur’s experiences while growing up in an extremely patriarchal household. She documents the relationship between her mother and her father as well as, her father and herself, which is the start of her negative relationships.
From a young age, she is confronted with the idea of what it means to disrupt one’s own view of self. An example of this can be seen in the following poem:
“You were so afraid
Of my voice
I decided to be
Afraid of it too” (17)
The controlling value purpose is that by restraining yourself, you are able to control how the world perceives you. In other words, the individual must be able to control themselves in order for others to accept you. As seen in the poem above, the narrator restrained herself which fosters acceptance from others. She limits her “voice” as a way as a way of controlling how other outside forces perceives her.
On the other hand, the controlling context is that when expressing yourself, you invite oppression from outside forces. Unlike the controlling premise, the context illustrates the negative factor of self identity, the narrator is able to express herself in a way that she personally feels is acceptable. By allowing yourself to be more open with your personal identity, you invite the chance of being oppressed by others. In the case of the poem, the other outside force is the “you”.
The opposing controlling value also helps to make sense of the text. The narrator must build her own self identity based on the views of others. An example of this can be seen in the same poem that I mentioned before. She must reinvent herself to fit the perception of others. Even though this reinvention of self is what the narrator wishes to be perceived as, it means nothing without the outside view of others. With that being said, the opposing controlling value is that self expression reestablishes self identity through external perception.
Since the narrator is so guarded of her self identity due to past experiences, this can lead to issue in the present. The opposing controlling context is the at by constantly trying to protect yourself, the leaves very little self to protect. Due to the fact that she must reestablish herself through the views of external perceptions, she must find the balance between what it means to be guarded and what it means to be expressive.
Section 2: Form and Genre
These poems challenge traditional poetry and take on the form of prose or free-verse poetry. This free-verse form makes the poems a bit more accessible to people who do not usually read poetry. Most of the pieces in this book are relatively short, spanning only a few lines, but they were all pretty impactful. What little words that she uses in her writing, carry a great deal of meaning which kept me engaged as a reader. The individual words have meaning to create the meaning of the poem. The poem creates meaning among the other poems in the section. Each section works together to create a complete narrative. Going into this book, I was interested in seeing what makes this poetry so effective as opposed to poetry collections containing much longer works.
For the most part, milk and honey falls into the genre of poetry and prose that deal with survival. Life’s struggles are inevitable which makes texts about overcoming obstacles so widely received. Everyone has been hurt, loved, been broken, and have healed or in the process of healing. It is all a part of the journey of survival. Even if the reader is unable to completely submit to the text due to it’s content, there is still some sort of relatability and accessibility.
The various works of poetry in this collection are vague and ambiguous, leaving the audience to derive their own meaning from the words. It challenges the traditional poetry genre, and it uses elements that connect the writer/narrator, and the audience. It manipulates form and genre very well, but also leaving plenty of room for individual perception and literal meaning.
There are many stylistic features that allow for the reader to respond to the pain and the journey of survival. Kaur often uses the second person point of view, which allows for the reader to place themselves within the piece. From the very first poem, “you” is used.
how is it so easy for you
to be kind to people he asked
milk and honey dripped
from my lips as i answered
cause people have not
been kind to me (11)
The audience is able to easily relate even though this was written from Kaur’s experiences. That’s one of the benefits of the features that work it this genre: easily accessible. We as the audience is placed in a sort of in between of narrator and addressee. The capable reader becomes the one telling the narrative.
In addition to the stylistic feature of using the second person point of view is the choice to include various images as well. These images correspond to certain poems which allow for the manipulation of the reader and further coerces them to access their past experiences and to apply these poems to their own pain. The pictures included alongside the text are sometimes incorporated into the text, which contribute to the form and structure of the poetry. Since, as mentioned before, most of the poetry is quite short, the illustrations help to guide the narrative and help the reader to gain another layer of intrigue. The illustrations further ignites these emotions and it makes the reader take a moment and consider what the correlation is and why has the author chose to include them.
Finally, the syllogistic progressive form can be found within the use of the four different chapters– the hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing. These four chapters unfold the progression of the Kaur’s life. Referring back to the back cover, Kaur says,
this is the blood sweat tears
of twenty-one years
Throughout the four chapters, we travel through Kaur’s childhood, her relationships, her heartbreak, her finding her own happiness, and her healing. One of the last poems makes one of the arguments that she consistently made throughout the book.
if you are not enough for yourself
you will never be enough
for someone else (197)
Kaur makes poetry more accessible through her use of language. She uses poetry as a genre, as well as a form to create a unique structure to tell her personal story through. The author use of form and genre does not only make the text more accessible and easier to understand for the inexperienced poetry reader, but the simplicity of the writing is also more impactful and powerful.
Section 3-Intertextuality
A major goal of Kaur’s poems is to portray or evaluate specific feelings, rather than focusing on individual events or moments. To truly understand the content of this book, one must apply a mimetic reading lense to the text. The narrator uses the poems as a reaction to various events that has occurred in her life, but the specifics of these events are never outright discussed. The reader is left wondering as to what happened, which forces them to partially construct these events only from that which is specifically provided by Kaur within the poems. There was a concrete set of events that took place during the book in a sequence, much resembling a plot. That being said, it can be a challenge at times to completely evaluate the text through either the Hermeneutic and Proairetic codes, due to the nature of how the book is structured.
The cultural codes play a vital role in framing the purpose for this collection of poetry. As mentioned in chapter six of “The Subject of Semiotics” by Silverman, “[t]he cultural codes, which are extremely numerous and heterogenous, to a very large degree subsume all other categories. They speak the familiar “truths” of the existing cultural order…” (Silverman 242).
The narrator explores the relationship between men and women heavily in this book, which plays heavily into a cultural code we all must contend with, the idea that men are usually representative of being powerful and possess authority, and devoid women of that right. Multiple times throughout this section, Kaur expands upon the concepts of falling apart, being empty, and being broken.
This was the main argument that she was trying to make throughout all for chapters of the book: self-love must come first. Kaur’s traumas led up to this realization, and she leads us to the same epiphany by taking us through our own pain. milk and honey was very successful in making the reader feel the pain that Kaur had felt intended any given poem, but also rehashing the reader’s own experiences and traumas which is what makes this a successful piece.
This comes from the fact that many of the poems do not make a lot of sense outside of the narrative and are unable to stand alone as a single poem. These concepts of fragility and emptiness lend themselves again to our cultural understanding of femininity, and stem from the fact that we live in a society that impresses upon its young girls and women the idea that they are less than whole. In terms of this book specifically, this cultural code exists as a sort of soil from which these poems manifest themselves. I think she takes us through the process of her submission to this value. She gets hurt and heartbroken, and when he leaves her, she is absolutely destroyed.
Section 4-Rhetoric of Narrative
Milk and Honey was written for a primarily female audience, but if willing to take on a specific readerly role, can be relevant more. She creates multiple roles for herself much like how the audience must create multiple roles while reading. An example of this being She would tell herself to get stronger, thus creating a victim out of herself. It can go on in circles how many roles she creates and then accidentally creates in trying to “help”. One could see this self help as encouraging and hopefully. The poems themselves are mostly vague and ambiguous, which allow them to be relevant to many different situations when taken out of context, an example being the following:
“The thing about writing is
I can’t tell if it’s healing
Or destroying me” (148)
The author makes the choice to use the pronoun “I” when referring to herself as a character in the narrative. It depends on what she thinks of herself and what others thinks of her. There are multiple personalities present, much like the audience must take on different readerly roles to truly understand the text at a thematic level. I do believe that it less to do with how relatable the reader might find the content, but more of the reader’s ability to take on different readerly roles.
The “you” (based on previous text) is some male figure from the narrator’s life. The male figure has authority in this case and is using it to suppress the narrator. A result the narrator tries to reject this preexisting societal expectations, but fails. There is a clear distinction between the “I” which is the protagonist, the “I” which is the narrator, and the “I” which pertains to the audience. I think my point is that we don’t need to be the same person as our character narrator. It’s something deeper that draws us in, that allows us to submit. This adds a larger significance to the male and female relations that is present in the text. The narrator writes on how others perceive herself and how she views herself. There is a difference between narrator and addressee, but there are certain moments when the two are blurred. The narrator takes on different perspectives which help to illustrate the different points of view in the narrative. It is prevalent that essentially the author wrote this collection of poems for herself which can be seen in pieces such as the following:
“You split me open
In the most honest
Way there is
To split a soul open
and forced me to write
at a time I was sure I
Could not write again (204).
The narrator directly communicates with the audience which helps to ground the entire work in reality.
Kaur draws on her own experiences while writing of these poems, but any reader willing to take on the appropriate readerly roles reads any one of these poems finds their own pain, their own heartache, or maybe even their own healing in it. All of these different examples of the content of the text can be applicable to many different situations.
The audience this book was targeted towards was largely female which is why it was difficult to be a submissive reader while reading the poems. In order to enjoy those two shows and Kaur’s poem book as an author I had to take on the authorial audience role. I had to create a new role that yearns for experience and make a commitment to actively appreciate what Kaur was communicating to her readers. I had to realize where the author is directing towards a specific audience and that the actual audience must assume the role of authorial audience.
Reflection Statement
Prior to taking this class, I had a very limited understanding of what it meant to “read like a writer.” I was aware that in order to be a good writer, one had to become a good reader. What I had not anticipated before was that you needed to be a diverse reader as well. I alway thought that if you chose to write in a certain genre, one should try to limit to reading in that one genre. I never really considered the the idea of taking on new readerly roles. The idea of the audience taking on different readerly roles is something that I now understand is essential to being and ethical reader and in turn an ethical writer. I found this ideology to be particularly fascinating to me because of just how new it was to me. I never really considered the importance of the narrator or the roles that the audience played and just how essential it was for the comprehension of the narrative. At the very start of the semester, I was introduced to the concept of close reading, which really helped to widen my perspective of how to read and analyze a text.
Something that I found particularly fascinating was just how universal all of the different reading methods are. I found it so interesting how I was able to apply the the same readerly lense to texts such as Herman Hesse’s Demian as I did to a book meant for children such as Caroline B. Cooney’s Driver’s Ed. I didn’t really understand that as a writer, one needed to read texts in different ways. I just assumed that all texts should be read the same way (mimetically). The idea that one In addition, I alway thought that it depended on the amount of books that you read and not so much on the types of books that you read. I tended to stick to one type of book and very rarely ventured out to different types of texts.
Something that I found interesting about this class was the idea of intertextuality. I had never heard of the concept of intertextuality prior to taking this class, but now I am aware of just how prevalent it is in literature. I found myself researching the authors of different text because it provided some, previously hidden and overlooked, insight on what is actually being told in the text. Overall, I had a very positive experience with the class as a whole. As a person trying to develop their own sense of who they are as a writer, incorporating the different methods of this class really helped me gain a greater perspective of just how influential different texts can be. I am now aware that it is not so much on the amount of texts that you read, it relates more on the variety of texts that you read and the way that you read them.
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