Gen Y Speaks: I battled self-doubt to make it to the big stage of spoken word poetry, because I believe poems can inspire youths

It was 2008 and I was spending summer in Vancouver on an internship. I was a painfully shy 20-year-old who knew no one in the city.

This was my very first spoken word poem, what I hoped was a sad but funny ode to a lost friendship and a former friend who loved Wes Anderson movies. Fifteen years on, I am still writing and performing poetry to strangers, chasing these feelings ever since. I worry frequently that the work I create will one day lose its power and urgency, that the years I have put into the art form might one day amount to nothing.After all, the term “poet” still has connotations of a pretentious, self-absorbed person who is likely to be anti-social.Like any form of art or literature, it’s a reflection of human experiences and there is a poem out there for everyone if you make the effort to look.

There is something incredibly vulnerable and beautiful about sharing poetry on a stage that can turn an audience of strangers into friends. What has kept me going has been creating spaces where people can feel safe and empowered enough to share their words, helping people from all kinds of backgrounds and realising that their stories and perspectives are worth sharing.

Recently, I was part of a film project with the National Arts Council called Words for Good, in which I was tasked to write and perform a poem based on interviews with several youths talking about their experiences with being hurt by words.

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