Sarah Kay

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. You will put the wind in winsome.

Lose some. You will put the star in starting over and over. And no matter how many landmines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to overtrusting, 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. Baby, I'll tell her, remember your mama is a worrier and your papa is a warrior. And you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more. Remember that good things come in threes.

So do bad things and 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. It can be about whatever you want.

Teknologiaa, ilmastoa, suunnitelmaa, perheesi, mitä olet syönyt yöpäivällä. Ainoa periaate on, ettei ajattele liikaa. Oletko valmiita? Mennään. Tässä on kolme asiaa, joita tiedän olevan totta.

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. I know that I am incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool. And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke. Why was the scarecrow invited to TED? Because he was outstanding in his field.

I'm sorry. Okay, so these are three things I know to be true. But there are plenty of things that 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. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and 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.

I was underdeveloped and overexcitable. 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 and 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 14-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 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 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,

I really felt that, thanks. And lightning struck. 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 person there

At least a decade. But somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-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 14, they told me right about being 14. So I did, and stood amazed every week when these brilliant grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me, hey, I really felt that too.

Now, I can divide my spoken word journey into three steps. Step one was the moment I said, I can. I can do this. And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie. Step two was the moment I said, I will. I will continue. I love spoken word. I will keep coming back week after week. And step three began when I realized that I didn't have to write poems that were indignant if that's not what I was. There were things that were specific to me. And the more that I focused on those things,

The weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine. It's not just the adage, write what you know. It's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don't know. I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been.

When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken word poetry. Actually, Phil Kay and I coincidentally also share the same last name. When I was in high school, I had created Project Voice as a way to encourage my friends to do spoken word with me. But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project Voice, this time changing the mission to using spoken word poetry as a way to entertain,

educate and inspire. We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus. And we saw over and over the way that spoken word poetry cracks open locks.

But it turns out sometimes poetry can be really scary. It turns out sometimes you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry. So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. And the first list that I assign is 10 things I know to be true.