I can still remember the first time I experienced spoken word poetry. It was my sophomore year and my high school was holding a poetry jam. I don’t remember who started off the reading but I do remember one girl getting up on the small stage and putting a few pieces of paper on a music stand in front of her. She was not someone I recognized but this wasn’t unusual, my school had close to 2,000 students. I don’t know when the poem she was reading started to strike me. Maybe it was the way she was reading it, like the words were coursing through her veins and spilling out of her mouth. These were not stale words on a page being read robotically, they were words with a life of their own and they resonated with me. I had always liked reading poetry but this experience was something different. I was enthralled.
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Throughout the day certain lines from the poem kept running through my head, “You will put the wind in win some…lose some / You will put the star in starting over.” I didn’t even know the name of the poem or the author but I couldn’t let it go. When I got home I began googling every variation of the lines I could remember, desperate to find the poem and listen again. After some searching, I came across it on Youtube. It was Sarah Kay’s “Point B,” a captivating catalog of life lessons she wanted to impart upon her future daughter. In my journey into spoken word poetry this was just the gateway poem. After finding “Point B,” I was sucked in by all of the suggested sidebar links. I spent hours clicking from poem to poem, moving through heartbreak and grief to honesty and love. For the first time in a long time, I felt inspired. It was spring, I was 16, and the world was going to be all right.
All the books, movies and songs aimed at my age were always telling the same story in different words. The world of poetry was something new. Simple moments were expanded into life lessons that held no age limit. I was starting to see how true artists could find magic where I thought none had existed. I began to pick favorites, playing them for friends. Taylor Mali’s, “What Teachers Make,” Katie Makkai’s “Pretty,” George Watsky’s “Drunk Text Message to God” and always coming back to Sarah Kay’s “Point B.”
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Recently I got the chance to hear one of my favorite spoken word poets, Andrea Gibson, perform live. Now in my third year of college, I feel a long way from the girl that I was at 16. My relationship with poetry hasn’t changed as much as I have but I also don’t feel myself relying on it as much as I once did. I am no longer boxed into one town trying to figure out who I should be or what I should feel. With that being said, I am not yet fully formed into the person that I want to be and I still have days where I doubt my self-worth. On days when it feels like the world is spinning a little too fast and I’m struggling to hold my ground, I go through the playlist of all of my favorite poets and savor all the lines that make me feel like I matter. Listening to these poems reminds me that sometimes, it’s enough to just believe in myself. In fact, it’s a lot more than some people have.
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