Sarah Kay

So if I'm going to tell my story and my relationship to poetry, it actually has to start earlier than that, which is that when I was in elementary school, my parents on a daily basis would pack me lunch and they would take turns.

They would trade off

writing a poem and putting it in my lunchbox and neither of my parents consider themselves writers neither of them consider themselves poets this was not part of a grand plan they definitely did not think this was going to happen but that is something they did as one of many things that they did to show me magic and wonder and care and love and inadvertently they therefore

introduced me to what a poem was.

And through that version of poetry, my definition for a poem was something that was a surprise, something that was a secret, something that was as dependable as clockwork.

something that someone who cared about me had made for me.

That's what I understood a poem was from a very early age.

And so that's what I treated poems as.

I wrote them in a notebook.

They were a secret and they were a small unit to present to someone I loved, usually my parent.

And then when I was around

13, 14 years old, I got a letter in the mail.

This was before email times.

I got a physical letter in the mail that said, congratulations, you've been registered to compete in the New York City Teen Poetry Slam.

The Poetry Slam was a competition for

poetry that was performed, which I did not know.

I had never seen a poetry slam.

I had never heard of a poetry slam.

I'm an elder millennial, so we didn't have YouTube back then, so I couldn't look it up.

All I knew about this event was that it was for teenagers in New York City who liked poems, and that was me.