“If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she’s gonna call me Point B …so she can always find me,” explains spoken-word poet Sarah Kay in a performance at TED X that elicited two standing ovations.
We often think that a linguistic intelligence creates only through written words. Not true. Sarah Kay proves there is still an oral tradition of storytellers and spoken-word poets creating through their own particular truth. Sarah, as teacher, writer and performer of words, shares the story of her gifts, thoughts and innate peculiarities with us, demonstrating great insight into not just her own inner workings, but helping us create a link to our own as well.
Sarah explains her journey into creating spoken-word poetry took three steps:
- “Step one was the moment I said: I can do this.”
- “Step two was the moment I said: I will. I will continue.”
- “Step three was the moment I said: 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.”
She says of step three: “It’s not enough to just teach that you can express yourself, you have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself and that is step three: infusing the work you’re doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing.” She says that step three never ends, but that “you don’t get to start on Step three until you take step one first. I can.” Let’s listen to what she has to say.
Sarah traces her passion for spoken-word poetry past her mentorship with the Bowery Poetry Club at age 14, to a diary entry she found from her childhood and showing us our gifts have early roots.
Sarah’s linguistic intelligence and penchant for performing is fueled by a keen exploration into her own thoughts, feelings and actions (an intrapersonal intelligence). She explains she “writes poems to figure things out…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.”
She tells people that spoken-word poetry is the art of performance poetry. It combines her passion for words with her love of performing, a bodily-kinesthetic intelligence; “it’s 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.”
You can track Sarah’s events and see more of her work on her website: http://www.kaysarahsera.com/