Rupi Kaur Opened Marie Claire's Power Play With Empowering Poetry
“I want to leave this place knowing I did something with my body other than trying to make it look perfect.”
On March 18, famed poet Rupi Kaur took to the stage to perform two of her empowering poems at the 2024 Power Play Summit, a 24-hour event designed to bring together some of the country’s most influential women to connect, inspire, and collaborate.
If you're on Instagram, there’s no doubt you’ll recognize Kaur’s work. Marked by her bite-size, all-lowercase poetic style, Kaur rose to fame in the 2010s when she began sharing snippets of her work on social media. Her poems on self-love, femininity, and trauma quickly became viral hits, prompting Kaur to write, illustrate, and self-publish her first collection of poems, milk and honey, in 2014. The book went on to sell 2.5 million copies worldwide, making Kaur a household name and paving the way for her later works, the sun and her flowers (2017) and home body (2020), which both debuted at #1 on bestseller lists. Nowadays, Kaur still posts her work for her 4.5 million Instagram followers and performs her poetry all around the world.
And that’s just what she did during day one of Power Play. To kickstart the summit, Kaur performed a poem titled “Laugh Lines and Wrinkles” from her book Home Body. Speaking on wrinkles, sun spots, and laugh lines, Kaur’s poem was a gorgeous ode to aging and the kind of message every Power Play attendee surely resonated with.
"I want to look like I was never afraid to let the world take me by the hand and show me what it's made of," she recited. “I want to leave this place knowing I did something with my body other than trying to make it look perfect.”
For her second poem, Kaur gave Power Play attendees a special treat with a performance of an unpublished poem titled, “Woman Who Will Not Die.” In her rendition, Kaur tells the story of a woman rejected by society who is burned and drowned in an attempt to kill her. But rather than dying, the woman comes out stronger, becoming fire and the ocean itself.
Kaur’s performance was in line with what the Power Play summit is all about: power and all of its nuances for women. Helmed by Marie Claire’s Editor-in-Chief Nikki Ogunnaike, the event brings together influential women across industries to discuss their own power and how it plays out differently in everyone’s lives.
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Brooke Knappenberger is the Associate Commerce Editor at Marie Claire, where she specializes in crafting shopping stories—from sales content to buying guides that span every vertical on the site. She also oversees holiday coverage with an emphasis on gifting guides as well as Power Pick, our monthly column on the items that power the lives of MC’s editors. She also tackled shopping content as Marie Claire's Editorial Fellow prior to her role as Associate Commerce Editor.
She has over three years of experience writing on fashion, beauty, and entertainment and her work has appeared on Looper, NickiSwift, The Sun US, and Vox Magazine of Columbia, Missouri. Brooke obtained her Bachelor's Degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism with an emphasis on Magazine Editing and has a minor in Textile and Apparel Management.
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