Elise Hu

He gave me orange juice and chocolate bars.

The color red sprang into relief singing Wagner's Valkyrie.

Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head.

I learned the samba from a Brazilian man so tiny, so festooned with glitter, I was certain that he slept inside a filigreed Fabergé egg.

No one at the door.

No salesmen, Mormons, meter readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman, no one.

Red notes sounding in a gray trolley town.

Thank you.

Sometimes when I read that, I feel like I should say, but then it got better.

Well, let's talk about that.

Yes, you did.

But it was a very monastic year.

Elizabeth Alexander in 2017.

Sarah Kay is a writer and poet who is also well-known for her spoken word poetry.

When I spoke with Sarah in 2018, I invited her to read a poem to open the episode.

Sarah, we just had you read a poem as our cold open of the show today.

Tell us a little bit about what you read.

Do you think that it is still possible, though, to create original art?

I mean, I think it's so interesting that the notes that we use to make music or the letters that we use to make words and then sentences and then paragraphs and stories and poems or the ingredients that we use to make food, they're all pretty fixed at this point.

You know, not too many people are inventing a new ingredient.