Source : Times of India
Sarah Kay is a poet, bestselling author and educator. The 30-year-old is also the founder and co-director of Project VOICE, an organisation that encourages self-expression among youth and communities through spoken word poetry. Kay spoke to us on the sidelines of Bhutan’s literature festival, Mountain Echoes.
Your session at the Thimphu litfest drew quite an audience. What inspired you to start performing spoken word poetry in your teens?
When I was 14, I got a letter that said you have been registered to compete in the New York City teen poetry slam. I had never attended or heard of one. The experience was so transformative; never in my 14-year-old life had a room full of people listened to me in my own words.
You’ve published several books of your poems. What is the difference between performing and writing them?
The first book I published was called B, which is a single poem with beautiful illustrations. Initially, I wasn’t interested in publishing it because it was written to be performed, not to be on paper. The publisher said that he felt the poem was one that people would want to put in the hands of someone they love and they can’t put a link to a video in someone’s hands. So it did take some pushing for me to see how these poems could work on the page. Now, I enjoy the challenge of finding ways of putting language on paper so that when you read it in your head, it sounds as close to the way it sounds when I perform it.
Do you think social media makes us less interested in reading poetry?
No, I don’t. The National Endowments of the Arts did this study in the US that revealed that the number of poetry readers has doubled since 2002. The highest-growing book category is poetry. Social media has in some ways created a whole new way for people to access poetry. People post their poems on Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube. I would not be here today if it weren’t for someone seeing my videos on YouTube.
Do you think poetry is inherently political?
I think every poem is political. Depending on who is writing it, who is reading it and the time period, I think even love poems or poems about flowers are political. For instance, I wrote a love poem questioning gender and the language we use to describe sexuality. I have performed it in spaces where suggesting that gender is anything but a binary is dangerous. Poetry is an art form that was historically meant for the elite.
When women, people of colour, or members of a marginalised group write poetry, it says that our language counts as literature and my family’s story counts as history even when it isn’t celebrated in mainstream art spaces.
What was the idea behind Project VOICE?
Project VOICE is about using the art form of spoken word poetry in educational spaces to entertain, educate and inspire. Poets like myself go into classrooms in schools around the world, teach workshops and talk to educators about how this art form can be useful to them in the classroom. A lot of education models assume that teachers and educators are the ones with the knowledge and they are going to give it to the students. I’m more interested in a model that says that students have visions, dreams, fears and flaws and as an educator, I am interested in hearing these.
In several Indian metros, spoken word poetry is finding a growing audience. What advice would you give an aspiring poet?
I actually hosted the first Indian youth national poetry slam. I would tell them to not be afraid of writing bad poems. A lot of people have a myth around creativity, which is that you’re either born a poet or not. If it’s hard or what people write is bad, they think that they’re not creative. Like anything else, poetry is a craft that requires time and work. So if you write a bad poem, that’s not evidence that you should quit, only that you should get better at it. The best poets also write bad poems.
