Feeling Is First

Until recently, when I looked for Spoken Word on Spotify, I got a lot of Levi The Poet, Shane Koyczan, and Neil Hilborn. Now these poets are great, and I appreciate a lot of their content. But they are also all white dudes. The human experience - the American experience - is so much more broad than any white man can express.  But then I found out that Sarah Kay was part of a compilation called 27: The Most Perfect Album. Then I found out that Andrea Gibson has a bunch of content on Spotify, and most of it is set to pretty music! Then I found out that Button Poetry started making Best Of albums and putting them on Spotify! Huzzah!  Sure, I could figure out how to make playlists on youtube of all my favorite Button videos, buuuuuuut I'm not gonna. I'm on Spotify more often than I'm on youtube, and Spotify doesn't have ads. So, if you're like me, and you love Spotify and Spoken Word and the opportunity to understand perspectives that are different from your own, pl

In my  previous post , I discussed the first of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The first letter is mostly about poetry, but the rest of the letters are about life and love more generally. His favorite topic seems to be solitude. Rilke sees solitude as a beautiful and necessary part of existence. He sees solitude as deserving of our reverence.  In his seventh letter, Rilke lauds solitude as the antidote for unhealthy enmeshment in relationships. He writes, "But those who have already joined forces and no longer distinguish and differentiate between each other, those who no longer possess anything that is truly their own: how should they find a way out of themselves, out of the abyss where their solitude is buried?"  Isn't that relate-able? Haven't we all, at some point, lost ourselves in a relationship? Rilke goes on to describe what love could be like if we saw each other as equals, "the love of two solitudes that protect, delimit, honor, a