![]() ![]() ![]() The beauty of a poem can lie in not knowing. "It's important to challenge myself to read things that I quote-unquote 'don't get,' " says Traci Thomas, host of the podcast and one-stop-shop for everything books, "The Stacks." "I'm obsessed with this idea of, 'Did I get it? Did I get it right?' And it's a really good exercise for me to not know. What matters is what you think it means (because) when you create art and then release it out to the world, it doesn't belong to you anymore." To Smith, it doesn't matter what a poem was "supposed to be when I wrote it. 'A chilling effect': What happens to our culture when books are banned "Sometimes we're taught to read poetry as if it's a code that we have to unlock or that it's a puzzle or a geometric proof with a specific answer," says Clint Smith, author of new poetry collection "Above Ground" and writer for The Atlantic. "I don't think that that's what poems are or should be." Yet, it's the same space where we're often taught to look at different forms of art as black or white, right or wrong. "Poetry offers us a powerful space in which to imagine the world that we want to see and to more clearly understand the world that we live in."Ĭultivating that curiosity starts in the classroom. "It made me feel seen and it made me feel like poetry could be something else aside from what I had been taught," the author of "Lineage of Rain" adds. candidate because of writers of color and how they "were using poetry to articulate their experiences and their politic." ![]() Poetry felt more reassuring to the current UCLA Ph.D. Janel Pineda, a Los Angeles-based poet and educator, has little in common with Walt Whitman and William Shakespeare.īut growing up, the 26-year-old'sview of poetry was heavily influenced by those two men, "both of whom were writers who have experiences that I didn't identify with as a working-class Salvadoran girl growing up in LA," says Pineda. To find out more about Kay, visit her website at KaySarahsera.Purchases you make through our links may earn us and our publishing partners a commission. Her poetry affirms the roller-coaster emotions of growing up.Īs a spoken word poet, many of her performances can be viewed on YouTube and on the Ted Talks channel. She makes the reader feel like they are reliving their own childhood, teenage and adolescent experiences. Kay’s poetry is entertaining and easy to read. “No Matter the Wreckage” was published by Write Bloody Publishing, and includes Kay’s poem “B” which was originally published in 2011 by Seth Godin and the Domino Project. She says, “They are laughing through/the speaker phone, they are laughing, and they/are driving on a highway they have not been on before.”Īs commonly seen throughout her poems, Kay uses everyday moments and objects as symbols for love and life. In the poem “My Parents on Their Way Home from A Wedding,” Kay touches upon the realization that parents are separate from their children they are two separate people in love. Her lines, “I notice minutes/move, much more than when I was younger” are symbolic of watching her younger self disappear. In a poem entitled “Evaporate,” Kay addresses how time speeds up when growing up. Kay uses everyday language to touch on universal themes that speak to readers who don’t typically favor poetry.Ī great example of the universal themes employed in her book is prevalent in a poem titled “Postcards”: “you can only fit so many words in a postcard/Only so many in a phone call/Only so many into space, before you forget/that words are sometimes used for things/other than filling emptiness.” Here, Kay writes about the importance of words and how sometimes they are insufficient in curing heartbreak. Poet Sarah Kay‘s first book No Matter The Wreckage is a collection of poems. This collection explores family, first loves and growing up. ![]()
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