Spoken Word and Coming of Age into Joy

You fell in love with spoken word poetry the way most people fall down the stairs. Awkwardly, jarringly, elbows-scabbed, but wide-awake.

You are twelve when you come of age into this love. 

That year, you stumbled upon a YouTube playlist of Button Poetry videos, poem after poem radiating off the screen. You find yourself obsessively rewinding Andrea Gibson’s “America, Reloading” and Franny Choi’s “Whiteness Walks into the Bar.” Quickly, you fall in love with the straightforward nature of spoken word — how it’s so accessible, yet so compelling. Spoken word makes you want to be the most honest version of yourself. 

Although enamored, you start out writing small. You write about loneliness, about the trees that line your front yard, about what your mom said to you on the car ride to school. Through a friend, you learn about a national network of youth writing competitions. You are twelve when you submit your first poem to the Scholastic Art and Writing awards, but to no avail. At twelve, you don’t know anything about the politics of teenage poetry — all you know is that all the poems that win seem to carry the same shape. 

You are fourteen when you learn to stop writing about joy. 

After years of uneventful submission, you learn to emulate the type of poetry that judges crave. Joy, you begin to learn, is a mediocre thing inflated by sentimentality and depreciated by universality. There is nothing heart-clutching or tear-jerking about joy. Tenderness does not make you special, so, instead, you write about trauma. 

You write about your mother, your grandmother, and your grandmother’s mother. You write about the boats your family fled on, a backyard orange grove destroyed by an anonymous war, a lineage of deferred familial dreams. You are always writing “as a daughter of immigrants,” “as an Asian American woman,” “as a Generation Z.” You are always over-explaining. You write about pain, identity, and reckoning, until it is the only horizon your poetry knows.

Perhaps in the back of your head, you sense something dangerous about boxing yourself in as an “otherized” poet. But for now, it doesn't matter because if stories are currency, then trauma is the American dollar. Now, you are fifteen and winning competitions like Scholastic and YoungArts with ease. More than that, Stanford University has just invited you to feature in a documentary series about racial injustice. Best Buy wants to spotlight you in their ad campaign about youth of color changing the world. The Oakland City Women’s March, San Francisco Public Library, and the National Young Artists Summit are all asking you to perform at their upcoming events. And you oblige. 

Your first ever performance is at the Santa Clara County Gun Violence Prevention Gala. You are asked to write and share a poem about youth activism and gun violence for an audience of county officials and city bureaucrats. In the weeks leading up to the event, you pour over articles and essays about school shootings, reading, and re-reading survivor testimonies and March for Our Lives speeches. On more nights than one, you find yourself crying over the accounts. But sadness is good for the craft, you remind yourself. Sadness gives you purpose, or at least something to write about.

The day of the performance, you try your best to deliver a heart-wrenching poem that will encapsulate all the hurt and fear young people feel because of gun violence.

After your set, a group of elderly women walk up to you and introduce themselves. With tears in their eyes, they tell you your poetry is spectacular and call you “an inspiration.” They ask if they can take a picture of you and your mom. You glow and happily oblige. Their phone cameras flash and you feel so seen. 

Finally, you are inching closer to everything you’ve ever wanted to be. 

***

You are sixteen when you’re selected to be a delegate to the International Congress of Youth Voices. 

That summer, you are flown out to San Juan, Puerto Rico to convene with 149 other youth writers from across the world. The Congress takes place in a large Hilton resort that sits right on the oceanfront, peering out over the Atlantic. This world of swirling glass doors and pre-professional language feels incredibly glamorous. Never before have you been flown out of the continental U.S., much less been flown out anywhere.

On the third day of the Congress, you and your friends Harry, Megan, and Viola are sitting at Victoria dock, eating ham sandwiches from a nearby deli. Harry, Megan, and Viola are all young writers, hopeful about making it big in the literary world. Like you, the three of them are all children of immigrants who work poetry freelancing jobs. Like you, they are all thriving off of the gears of the “teenage writing industrial complex,” a half-facetious, half-derisive term used to describe the cycle of commercializing of teenage poetry. Unlike you, however, Harry has started questioning his participation in this cycle.

“Sometimes, I think to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing? Reading all these poems about my grief and trauma for a room full of rich, white people,’” he shares, as the four of you dangle your feet off the edge of the dock. “I perform these poems about racism and literally the worst things that have happened to me just for them to tell me I’m inspiring? Isn’t that kind of fucked?”

A film of uneasiness slips over you. Although you don’t want it to, a part of what Harry says lodges in your chest.

Your mind trains on a specific event — a Hewlett-Packard equity event you performed at last year. Right before preparing to speak, you scanned the room of 300 faces and panicked when you couldn’t find any that looked like your own. Suddenly, you realize you have spent the past year performing in dozens of rooms full of people who don’t like you, rooms that your first generation immigrant parents — or the subjects of any of your poems — would not be welcomed into. 

You realize you’ve rationalized a sort of transaction in your head. You package your trauma into pretty little poems in exchange for applause from rich executives. You are selling poems about your grief to powerful audiences hungry for your pain. You wonder if you are really an inspiration, or just a spectacle. You think about Danez Smith’s poem “Dinosaurs in the Hood.” How he writes, 

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“​​But this can’t be

a black movie. This can’t be a black movie. This movie can’t be dismissed

because of its cast or its audience. This movie can’t be a metaphor

for black people & extinction. This movie can’t be about race.”

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and you wonder if Danez knows something you don’t. You are sixteen and all the poetry you have ever written situates you as the “racialized other.” Originally, you fell in love with spoken word because it allowed you to talk about race in a way that was freeing. But now, you only feel suffocated. 

Poetry has calcified you.

***

You are eighteen when you arrive at Yale, a little burned out and a little disillusioned. 

You took a break from freelancing your senior year summer and are unsure where you stand with poetry. You still aren’t able to write without hallucinating an audience’s reaction in your head. You still can’t tell the difference between drafting a poem and dressing your sadness for consumption. Despite this, you know you aren’t ready to let go of spoken word. 

A month into the semester, you join WORD, Yale’s oldest spoken word poetry team. There, you meet a loud community of Black, Indigenous, and Asian writers whose poems aren’t constrained by their identity. During one meeting, Amma writes a poem about the politics of writing bad English papers. During another, Mandy writes a poem about jaywalking around campus “just to feel something.”  To them, writing is not a lofty thing that needs to be weighty. Writing is light and spontaneous — a thing with feathers.

Slowly, you begin to view your work the same way. The joy of poetry starts ebbing its way back to you. You are reminded of the satisfaction of languishing in language and fussing over adjectives. For once, you feel free. The audience in your head has finally retired. 

For WORD’s end of the year showcase, one of your best friends Aanika writes a poem about dancing whales. Her poem is fantastic and whimsical, and explores the way joy can be passed down generationally — like vestigial structures in an animal. On the night of the showcase, she graces the stage with the line, 

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“I cannot believe a creature

with the largest heart of any living thing

refuses to dance just because it

doesn’t have feet.” 

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That night, you promise yourself to start wearing your joy as your own. You, too, believe that whales can dance. 

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