Why Rupi Kaur and Her Peers Are the Most Popular Poets in the World

John Ashbery's death in September gave my world a lurch, as the 90-year-old eminent American experimentalist was my favorite living poet. But the compensation was to discover how many others felt the same way. The appreciations became a rare public conversation about poems rather than about Poetry, and what it is or isn't (as in last year's exhausting brouhaha over Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize) or whether it's "dead," or corrupted by elitist obscurism, or replaced by popular music, or secretly thriving. On social media, people posted their favorite Ashbery poems and passages, like this one from 1977's "The Other Tradition," which might seem to refer to those cyclical debates: "They all came, some wore sentiments / Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness / Of the hour ... "