On Spoken Word and TED Talks

Lately I have found myself engrossed in TED talks.  I stumbled upon a talk by spoken-word poet Sarah Kay and have been inspired to start working on my own spoken word pieces.  The process has been totally liberating so far.  Below is a piece that I wrote tonight.  Enjoy!

Stark, Bright, Pressed (9/25/2013)

You only like to read fiction.  That's why I didn't mail the letters to you.

Letter writing is a three-step process.  One: you spill your guts out using nothing but pen, paper, and sheer bravery.

Two: you use your fingers to carefully fold and refold the message.  There is a proper art to letter folding.  It isn't like origami.  Simple shapes do not become complex pressed-fiber structures.  No--instead, the intricate meshwork of words becomes streamlined and plain.  You could hold it in the palm of your hand or in the back of your pocket and it would go unnoticed because no one really cares about small, properly folded pieces of paper.  But you would know the specialness of that small piece of paper and so you would continue to hold it--still in your hand or in your pocket or maybe even over your heart if you had a suitable pocket there.

Three: you send the letter.  This usually involves an envelope, stamps, and a postal company.  It is the shortest task in the letter-writing process for the author.  But don't let that make you feel that it is the easiest.  It is never easy to subject your guts to the cold aluminum hallways of the post.

In the eighth grade I would write letters to my friends and they would write back to me.  And maybe we wrote letters because we were nineties kids who didn't have access to text messaging.  But maybe we wrote because we knew we could leave our guts on those Hilroy notebook pages.  And we knew we could pass them on to our friends and that they would hold those guts so tightly and so carefully in their pockets, folded and perfect.

And we would feel less alone, too.  Few people feel more alone than fourteen year old girls who must stumble in the darkness of adolescence to find the light switch that is womanhood...or at least the idea of it.

Now that I am grown and standing in that light I find it difficult to write letters.  But I wrote letters to you.  Lots of them.  Even though you don't know it.  You reminded me of the beauty of shadows and of the glory of stumbling, and of falling hard for you in the dark.

It is not the darkness of adolescence, but the stark, bright, pressed linen of adulthood that makes cowards of us.  So we don't let our friends carry our thoughts in squares in their pockets anymore.  And we don't send our guts by post.

We hold our own thought squares, stumble in our own light, and hope--

That somewhere, someone just as cowardly as us is stumbling in their own light, waiting to read non-fiction, and wanting to receive our guts in the mail.

...

E