I want her to see the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat, to look through a magnifying glass at the galaxies that exist on the pin point of a human mind. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting I am pretty damn naive but I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar.
And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. Always apologize when you've done something wrong, but don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.
Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing. And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother. All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. They can be about whatever you want — technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast.
The only rule is don't think too hard. Okay, ready? So here are three things I know to be true. I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, "A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order. Why was the scarecrow invited to TED? Because he was out standing in his field. I'm sorry. Okay, so these are three things I know to be true. But there are plenty of things I have trouble understanding.
So I write poems to figure things out. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. Sometimes I get to the end of the poem, look back and go, "Oh, that's what this is all about," and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it. Spoken-word poetry is the art of performance poetry.
I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person. When I was a freshman in high school, I was a live wire of nervous hormones. And I was underdeveloped and over-excitable. And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken-word poetry. I felt that my two secret loves, poetry and theater, had come together, had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know.
So I decided to give it a try. My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me.
The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking. I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead she just nodded at me and said, "Hey, I really felt that.
I was hooked. I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the year-old wandering about. In fact, they welcomed me. And it was here, listening to these poets share their stories, that I learned that spoken-word poetry didn't have to be indignant, it could be fun or painful or serious or silly.
The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well. Never mind the fact that I was They told me, "Write about being Now I can divide my spoken-word journey into three steps.
Step one was the moment I said, "I can. And if you know a poem that articulates the inexpressible, tell us about it via hello theatlantic. Lincoln even asked to remain anonymous as the author when he sent the third canto. A sound of danger strikes his ear; He gives the breeze a snuff; Away he bounds, with little fear, And seeks the tangled rough. When I got off, I felt a little woozy—and not because I was reading on a moving vehicle. Schizophrene is a smattering of impressions, in no particular order, from the journey of a migrant.
The images she creates are violently in flux, and heavy with the trauma of constantly leaving and arriving, but never belonging. This passage, towards the beginning, gave me goosebumps:.
The ship docked, and I found my home in the grid system: the damp wooden stool in the bath, a slice of bread with the cheese on it, and so on. I grew up in New Delhi, and briefly lived in Dallas during middle school, when my parents flirted with the idea of immigrating to America and ultimately decided against it.
But I came back to America for college, and now live in Washington, D. I am lucky in that I moved around by choice—a sanctioned choice, affirmed by the documents in my nightstand drawer.
That is not a luxury awarded to all migrants. People walk through deserts to put food on the table, only to be treated like malicious invaders. The answer is not easy. Later that night it rained, washing the country away. A country both dead and living that was not, nor ever would be, my true home. Yet if the antidote to despair is hope, then " Dedications ," the last of the 13 sections, is a kaleidoscopic testament to hope, at once a letter and a prayer.
Rich turns directly to the reader:. I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window …. She evokes the image of feeble light against growing darkness throughout the poem, juxtaposing the dim desolation of life with the illumination of resistance. She speaks to different individuals—a mother, a child, an immigrant—and, by directly summoning them as readers, acknowledges their struggles.
Rich writes:. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear…. And she captures the way a country itself can seem like an ever-narrowing room, its barriers increasingly stifling. Rich maps the lives of those whose voices are not heard, focusing on events or moments often invisible to others. By doing so, she reconstructs the space of her poetry, using it as a vessel to honor them. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight … because even the alphabet is precious.
Here, the very act of reading becomes an act of survival, an endurance of hope despite adversity. The poem ends as such:. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
The nakedness of this last image suggests complete vulnerability, yet also hints at a beginning. For me, radical hope is when you find a home in words; when, stripped as you are, there is promise in what comes next.
In , the year before my grandmother was born, James Weldon Johnson published a book of poems with the intent of preserving the oral tradition of old-time black preachers. I like this poem because it gives dignity and gravity to the life and death of Sister Caroline, who would otherwise go quietly and faintly.
I could have picked any number of wonderful poems, but the first that popped to mind was one I found five years ago in a poetry book I randomly bought at a used bookstore in Oakland. Looking back, maybe it was a sign that I would one day write for the same publication as Thoreau It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion. First: How terrifying is that? The mundane, orderly beginning to the poem feels a bit like a homeowner giving a gentle, if slightly boring, tour of a perfectly nice house: We just got these frosted sconces; the guest bathroom is at the end of the hall on the left; we love the backsplash, too.
It invites the reader to recognize the speaker, who is silent and invisible while making herself both seen and heard. The beauty of the natural landscape the ripple of water, the refraction of sunlight almost totally obscures her—but you nonetheless feel her specter viscerally.
But now that I reflect on this poem years after first encountering it, I can also find something curiously tragic in it.
The speaker seems lost, alone, and less ghoulish than I first thought. She introduces herself in parentheses as if whispering for someone to witness, if not the fullness of her life, then at least the fact of her death.
Like hundreds of other young women, I turned to Plath, with her pure, fearless authenticity, to ferry me through the tangle of growing up. Composed after a stint in hospital recovering from an appendectomy, the poem finds Plath lying in an all-white room as she considers a bouquet of tulips next to her:. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. It was a desire that began creeping up on me too as I passed from girlhood to womanhood and the world, which had once seemed so light and open, started imposing its constraints.
Suddenly, my body was a double-edged weapon; at night, I walked quickly, with my arms crossed over my chest. Suddenly, I entered a world that had been set up without my permission and seemed, sometimes, to whittle my ambitions down.
Tulips put into words all the feelings I could not say—portraying the real life of one women, and in doing so, revealing a part of us all. Give her a hug for me.
February 20, at am. A little girl will always need her momma, regardless of age. February 22, at pm. Have a great week-end Xo Like Like. Follow Following. Words for the Year Join 4, other followers. Sign me up.
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