Sarah Kay

Well, neither do I. But I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold on to others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk. They hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for. Every time I open my mouth, that impossible connection.

There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima city to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth.

When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible...

I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it. And I don't know that much about reincarnation either. But if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around. Thank you.

Oh, that's a big question.

Well, I think my relationship to poetry has evolved over my living.

But when I am feeling an emotion or going through an experience or revisiting a memory, that feels unlanguageable.

And then I discover that someone has found language for it in the form of a poem.

That is one of the most magical experiences.

And poetry has provided language, certainly, but also camaraderie or belonging or reassurance or community or a lot of things.

Poetry offers a lot of things.

And then I get to see the way that other people also build lives around poetry for themselves.

healing for processing for activism for education for collective experience for live performance I mean it goes on and on that's my whole thing let's talk a little bit about your life and where you began you grew up going to see spoken word poetry I believe being performed in New York City and

Sure.

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.