“At nine years old I transform into things I’ve never been before: an astronaut floating in space, a hummingbird buzzing in place, a beam of August light, floating through the leaves.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Phil Kaye, & Andrew Warner. Congrats poets!
Get your copy of Phil Kaye’s forthcoming book, DATE & TIME, dropping 9/18/18!
“I will stop telling myself to get smaller. I will stop wishing for a bracelet of a waist.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Miss K, & Ollie Schminkey. Congrats poets!
“I did not know then that identities could be lost in translation.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Diksha Bijlani, & Neil Hilborn. Congrats poets!
“Our love is tragic. Our bodies are tragic. Our struggle is your selling point, your box-office bait, your elevator pitch.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Kevin Kantor, & Steven Willis! Congrats poets!
Appreciating poetry is often about patience: sitting with a poem, meditating on it, and re-reading it multiple times. With spoken word, we don’t always get a chance to do that. This series is about taking that chance, and diving a little deeper into some of the new poems going up on Button.
“Become dust with me, my love, insignificant and everywhere.”
I always appreciate poems that take something big and universal, something that we all already “understand” on an intellectual level, and challenge us to see that something in a new way. Death, for example, is everywhere, every day, something we all have to deal with in one way or another. Because of its universality, certain tropes and motifs have sprouted up around the concept of death– the grim reaper, tombstones, caskets, skeletons, mausoleums, etc.
This poem doesn’t just repeat those tropes, but it also doesn’t completely ignore them; its imagery walks that line between what is familiar and what is new. So yes, there are skulls in the poem, but there are also “sprouts of curious grass shooting from our eye sockets.” That shift– evident in the imagery as well as the deeper issues explored in the poem– creates space for us to rethink our understanding of death. How does a conversation about death intersect with a conversation about love? What can we learn by juxtaposing the two concepts? Perhaps in doing so, we can gain a greater understanding of both, even when they’re so often held up as opposites. This poem challenges that framework in a memorable and powerful way.
“Non-bisexual people definitely know more about being bisexual than I do.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Daniel, & Rachel Wiley! Congrats poets!