Just as an aside, I had to laugh a little at your comment re: Ashbery. His poetry is notoriously "difficult" even for "serious" readers of contemporary poetry,

Just as an aside, I had to laugh a little at your comment re: Ashbery. His poetry is notoriously "difficult" even for "serious" readers of contemporary poetry, that is, until you read enough of it that you start to understand the internal logic - then it can be very impressive. I suppose it depends on your patience for book-length hyperconvoluted and hypercontextual poems. I think his best material comes from some of the later and longer works - "Flow Chart" would be a good starting place. For Rupi Kaur, it's probably best to think of that material as the equivalent of training wheels on a bicycle. At least it gets people reading a book that claims to be related to poetry in some way, right? You have to remember, her target demographic is the middle school to early 20s crowd, and most of it was intentionally designed to be easily consumed on social media more than for any attempt at literary merit.