Rupi Kaur Opened Marie Claire's Power Play With Empowering Poetry

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For her second poem, Kaur gave Power Play attendees a special treat with a performance of an unpublished poem titled, “Woman Who Will Not Die.”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.