Sarah Kay is a word artist, both spoken and writen. She was born in New York City, went on to graduate from Brown University, and then found a poetry project (Project V.O.I.C.E.) that aims to empower young people to find their voices. Her poetry collection No Matter the Wreckage is a beautiful show of sophisticated, modern talent that is every bit as enticing as her spoken word poetry.
Her poetry hangs somewhere between exploring femininity and fluidity, between explaining the past and predicting the future, teasing at the promiscuous distinction between wisdom and knowledge. She asserts herself with every poem, uses her stage as a way to explore what it means to feel like one person in the middle of a crowd, or on the sidelines watching billions of other people exist at once. She articulates both maturity and developmental stages. She understands pain, she understands hope and love, and she will tell you how to respect yourself over and over again.
Her poem ‘The Type’ is the definition of empowerment. It’s everything you need when you feel let down, when you’ve found yourself feeling beat by a toxic relationship, or – as the poem specifically deals with – when you’ve found yourself being disrespected by men, and when that disrespect leads to you questioning your own self worth. Sarah Kay gives you the space to find your voice again, to assert your space in the world, and to venture forward, proudly putting the past behind you.
‘Woman, if you grow up the type men want to love, You can let them love you. Being loved is not the same thing as loving. When you fall in love, it is discovering the ocean after years of puddle jumping. It is realizing you have hands. It is reaching for the tightrope when the crowds have all gone home.’
The Type, Sarah Kay
It sounds deep, but it’s like listening to music: it brings out all these feelings you’ve never actually had, but that you somehow identify with and use to empower yourself to deal with other situations. Poetry is often a lesson in empathy, and none express empathy better than Sarah Kay.
I’ve downloaded all her poems, and I find myself needing to listen to them often, especially as I’m growing older. It seems like for every crisis I encounter, every bad day, every memory and every new feeling, Sarah Kay will be able to articulate something I need to hear. Her poetry provides a space to clear your mind, to remember, to start anew or keep pushing.
‘B’, or, ‘If I Should Have a Daughter’ is another of my favourites. I personally have never imagined myself with children until this poem. Strangely, I now find myself – whenever I make an important decision – thinking “What would I want to tell my daughter I did?” It’s a strange way to feel responsibility, but I think it’s more importantly a way of asking myself “What would I want to tell myself as a child that I did, if I had the chance?”
“There’ll be days like this, my momma said, when you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape. When your boots will fill with rain, and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment, and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you, because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline. No matter how many times it’s sent away.”
B, Sarah Kay
This poem explores wisdom, maternity, maturity and femininity in a way that subtly asserts the need to let girls have voices (rather than calling them ‘bossy’, for instance – Emma Watson unpacked this common childhood issue pretty well), and articulates the challenges faced in growing up in a world where you will find yourself ‘up to your knees in disappointment’, whilst on other occasions seeing the world ‘through the underside of a glass-bottomed boat’.
“Three days ago, I was in the Santa Cruz redwoods tracing a mountain road in the back of a pick up truck watching clouds unravel into spider webs. Two days from now, there will be forest fires so thick, they will have to evacuate that part of Santa Cruz. The flames will paint the nightly news a different shade of orange and when it happens, I will already be in New York city watching something else on TV.”
Forest Fires, Sarah Kay
‘Forest Fires’, ‘When Love Arrives’ (with Phil Kaye) and ‘Hiroshima’ are all brilliant examples of how Sarah crafts stories within her poetry. The first relates past and present, drawing lines between generations and tracing transience through family and tragedy. ‘When Love Arrives’ gives a voice to love in a way that shows its developments and its complexities as people mature.
I’d never heard a poem like ‘Hiroshima’ before – it’s not only dealing with the consequences of a nuclear bomb, it’s dealing with existentialist ideas and the need for a legacy, but in the most beautiful, simplistic and honest manner.
I hope you’ll lend your ears to Sarah Kay’s poetry for a while, and that you find yourself as moved as I was by it! Find more of her poetry on the speakeasyNYC Youtube channel here, and watch her latest poem (published this week!) below: