Freshman year of high school I had a superpower. I would roll out of bed five minutes before class and be out the door, hop in my ride’s car, and still be on time for my 7:15 am class. I lived a mile away from school. Armed with four protein bars and walking into school with barely brushed hair and a hoodie thrown over my pajamas, I walked into my Freshman English class bleary-eyed and weighed down by at least three books. I had sat down at my seat, intending on nothing more than just sleeping through class. Then my teacher started introducing the new unit. Spoken word poetry. He then explained that at the end of the unit, we would have to write and perform a poem. As a class, he had us watch different performances of spoken word and the one that stuck with me the most was Sarah Kay’s performance of her poem Point B. This was how I was introduced to the Poetry Discourse community.
I remember watching Sarah Kay’s performance for the first time and being completely captivated by her words and the way she was able to use literary devices. The way she animated herself, made her voice rise and fall, her unwavering confidence and her performance was as fluid as water. That exact moment was when I decided that I wanted to be able to do that. To make words bend at my will, to captivate hundreds, or thousands, with a three minute poem. She was able to give me an end goal: one day, I will do that. It wasn’t so much the words she was saying, but how she said them, and how much imagery and emotion she put into her poems. She wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable, and I admire her for that.
During that class, I wrote my first poem: Books. I specifically chose to write about books because at that time in my life, the only thing that mattered to me was books. It was a form of escapism. Prior to freshman year of high school, my mom was married to this guy who was, for lack of a better term, unhealthy to everyone involved. They had gotten a divorce in 2019 so we had to move back across the valley to my hometown, where I attended high school. The transition was harsh on all of us, and for me it awoke some massive anxiety throughout that summer. When going from an unsafe environment to a safe one, it gives you the freedom to fall apart and that is what we all promptly did. In that summer, I felt three years worth of anxiety in three months. I thought that once school had started, it would magically fix everything. Once the school year started, I was thrown into the deepest depression I have ever been in. Books were a way to keep going, and as soon as I was introduced to poetry I found an outlet. I found a way to use my voice in a way I never thought I would be able to. I never took myself to be one to stand out, but I found myself wanting to make an impact on the people around me, an impact like the way Sarah Kay’s poem impacted me and honestly changed my life. With poetry, I found a way to articulate things in the written word that I could never with actual speech. When I wrote my first poem, I decided at that moment that I had to do something with this.
I do not know what makes you qualify as a poet in the grand scheme of things, but I think it was right there and then. The moment I decided poetry was the language that I wanted to be fluent in. My first poem made me a poet but that doesn’t mean I was fluent in it yet. It happened slowly over time. I started writing more and more poems. In varying quality. I started to read a lot of poems. My English teachers have always said “if you want to write something, make sure you read”; and the general idea behind this was that if you see good examples of the written genre you would begin to learn what is expected in that community. I was a giant fan of sonnets when I first started out, so I started reading Shakespeare. Then I discovered haikus and I wrote so many haikus. What started my love for haikus? Avatar: The Last Airbender. Specifically, the episode where Sokka gets stuck in a window for a poetry meeting where they only speak in haikus and the following battle of poetry between Sokka and the Teacher was absolute perfection. I tried out some other different types of poetry, but around the end of 2021 is when I started posting my poems onto instagram. Since instagram only allows a square, it greatly limited the amount of text I could post. For example, lengthy poems (like sonnets) wouldn’t be able to fit in the space provided and still be visible enough so people wouldn’t have to squint to read it. It was perfect for haikus, but at this moment in time my work started shifting towards free-verse poetry with an occasional rhyme to it.
It wasn’t until a year later where I started trying to tell stories with my poems. This started because I read a book about a girl trying to find herself and fight for her safety (she was in an abusive household) and it was told through poetry. It wasn’t lengthy poems either. These specific poems I wouldn’t put on instagram. Stories were meant to be books, so I started drafting a poetry chapbook. The story that I had made wasn’t clear cut and it was more of an arc. I would explain it best as watching a relationship fall apart from behind opaque glass where you don’t know and can’t identify the people but you can feel their feelings.
Still, my poetry never felt like poetry because of the form it lacks. My poems started to get repetitive, like I was just saying the same thing just with different words. It was like my poetry was going stale. My poetry was never nearly as captivating or creative as Sarah Kay’s. They started losing feeling and life, like I was drawing them from an empty well. I decided if I couldn’t write poetry I was proud of, I just wouldn’t write.
My senior year of high school I was assigned to do an Ekphrastic poem. Which is basically picking a picture and describing the picture in a poem. It could be anything from picking the point of view of a person, or a trash can, really anything. And the end of the assignment was to present it in front of the class. For the assignment, the specific parameters were to write about something that has affected everyone on a country-wide or world-wide scale and that no, the pandemic does not count. I ended up choosing the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and as I was creating the poem, I realized I enjoyed writing poetry with form and rules than the free-verse poetry I was writing in for the better part of two years. I think that is because it gave my poetry more meaning than it originally would have if it was free verse. For example, if a poem is written in a sonnet with specifical syllables and rhyming schemes, if that is broken it adds to the poem’s meaning. Basically, a poem can have more meaning if the rules are defied than if the rules weren’t there. The majority of the poems that I am most proud of are the ekphrastic poem I made (America’s Wrath), Looking Glass, and You Were Here (this one made it to a semi-finalist round last year) tend to be the ones that also follow rules. Rules give a guideline to follow and forces creativity in a way that’s like “what word or phrase has exactly seven syllables and means this general idea” and it forces thinking out of the box. I would say it’s a puzzle I’m happy to solve.
My literacy journey has been a crazy ride. If you told the girl who wrote Books that one of her poems was able to make it to a Semi-Finalist round in a poetry contest, she would think April Fools came early. So much can happen in so little time, and even though it is not much, it’s more than I thought possible.
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