Host: Did you know April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate, we wanted to hear from some of our nation's young poets.
Kevin Gu: Hi, everyone. My name is Kevin Gu. I'm 17 years old and I'm the National Students Poets of the Northeast.
Host: Kevin is the 2021 National Student Poet representing the Northeast region of the United States for the National Students Poets Program. Here's how he started writing poetry.
Kevin Gu: Writing poetry was something that came naturally. I can't really pinpoint the specific time or period of my life in which I began, but just from a young age, it started being incorporated into my life. As a child of Chinese immigrants, I can recount the numerous folktale stories that my father told me at night. In fact, the first poem I ever memorized was one by Li Pai, a prolific Chinese poet.
It also helped that Chinese history of poetry is so rich and vibrant, but I really clutched to these stories as a child and I think that's what gave me an avenue to really explore my own heritage more deeply through this medium. Poetry also is just an amazing tool and device to grow and heal. It's just a medium of telling stories that's abstract and unbound by the limits of conventionalism.
Poetry makes legible what is not usually afforded the luxury of language, my body, my culture, how it fastens to me, how it remains corporeal in my body, on my skin. I just love telling stories through this style of writing. It's just a wonderful format that really allows me to breathe and exhale and say everything I want to say in such a beautiful way.
Host: Listen, Kevin is clearly wise beyond his 17 years. He'd also told us a bit about what he'd like readers to take away from his poetry.
Kevin Gu: After gaining experience on how to wield language as a tool, it allows me to express holy and fearlessly to craft my own meaning to help me say I'm happy in a million wonderfully different ways. I want the reader to take away this. I want them to see my story, stories of my parents' struggles as immigrants, societal ruptures, the disjoint in the two cultures I exist in, the two languages I communicate. Through this, I let poetry carve my future to foster my curiosity and love for language to breathe life into unspoken stories that one day hopefully readers will be able to hear and to read.
Host: Without further ado, here's Kevin Gu with his poem Splinterings.
Kevin Gu: [recites Splinterings poem]
Ma, remember how you would hold me?
It was on days just like these,
We took naps under the curtains,
Dozed off sun,
Us steamed sweet like overused bamboo baskets.
Dozed off son: our hands pressed together,
Remember, you were happy.
You would take me to the market
Stringed beneath those drunken stars,
Elegies of your husked breath seeding sighs within the concrete.
You remained unspoken,
But I heard how you thought back to Pa
And missed how he held us too,
Musculature and all.
Sometimes I think back to when I was five,
How we broke sunflower seeds with our teeth.
Back then I thought the chip in your smile was a splintering
The same bite that bit yourself raw,
But it was just your fingers picking at it until it eroded away and away.
Five o’clock,
Five feet deep below the rubber soles of your burdened feet.
Do you think back then, too?
It wasn’t so bad.
Look at me again, Ma,
Run your hands through my hair, black,
And I’ll run my hands down your cheek, salted.
Host: My thanks to Kevin Gu for sharing his work with us today. We'll have more young poet throughout the month of April. Thanks to our amazing Planning Editor and Producer Shanta Covington for this piece.
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