Saturday night, November 1, Keene State College’s Night Owl Cafe hosted a Poetry Slam featuring World Poetry Slam finalist, T. Miller.
“I think the thing for me that worked out early is that I found out who I was to poetry,” Miller said.
Miller said she finds value in performing to college students and inspiring them.
“I think the importance of me, especially going to colleges, is me understanding and recognizing that these are not like middle schools and high schools, these are the future leaders of today. Not even tomorrow, like, of right now,” Miller said.
Sam Lewis / Equinox Staff: The Night Owl Cafe hosts a poetry slam featuring World Poetry Slam finalist, T. Miller, on Saturday night, November 1.
Miller also teaches creative writing and poetry classes to children in an inner city and finds it beneficial to teach these subjects to her students.
“I’ve always found it important to not bring creative writing to the inner-city but to bring the inner-city to creative writing,” Miller stated.
“All of my kids, I tell them from the first time that you don’t have to be a writer after this class, you don’t have to like creative writing, you don’t have to like poetry but you will have another way to deal with what’s inside, so I think that’s important,” Miller said.
Hearing nothing but good things about Miller, coordinator of the event and KSC student Connor Turmelle spoke about the importance of bringing a poetry slam to KSC.
“I feel like people learn how to express themselves in different ways. And I feel like Keene, being such a diverse school, I feel like it’s cool to bring in all these different learning techniques,” he said.
Turmelle said that poetry “allows everyone to show their true colors.”
Opening with one of her newest poems, “Throw Back Thursday,” Miller expressed her creativity and true colors through sensitivity and power.
“One day your whole life will be a Throw Back Thursday picture. Our grandchildren will laugh at our outfits, the bow ties, the skinny jeans, the t-shirts that we thought were cool, the ones that we are wearing now,” Miller said in her poem.
“We’ll be stuck, trying to remember the past to hold to our own stories, with not enough data to tell them correctly,” Miller concluded, and thanked the audience.
Halfway through the program, Miller opened the floor for the audience to ask her a variety of questions.
During the question and answer session, Miller answered a question from a student on how she overcomes writer’s block.
“I’ll notice I have writer’s block when I’m just not living enough. It’s like, ‘oh I’ve been cooped up in the house, haven’t been hanging out with my friends,’ you just haven’t been gaining enough experience or inexperience to write about,” she said.
Miller continued, “So I’ll literally go find things that I need to do and find inspiration.”
Miller answered another question from a KSC student about what inspires her to write in the first place.
“I write more about the low points. In the moment that you feel some sort of pain, we all become potent. Whether it be right now or not. It’s like after your first heart break, I think everybody probably wrote a poem,” Miller stated.
During the open-mic segment of the event, after hearing Miller’s inspiration to write, KSC student Alison Howard felt compelled to share a written poem of hers, one that was also inspired from a low point.
“In the end I guess the memories will go, every single moment that we used to know,” Howard said as she concluded the poem that she shared. Howard also talked about why poetry is important to her.
“I guess it’s interesting because it can be anything. It doesn’t have to be rhyming, it doesn’t have to be you know specific, it could just be whatever you want,” she said.
“And it kind of shows that you can just speak and that can be poetry, and it can be funny and it doesn’t have to be heartbreaks or anything, it could just be whatever,” Howard continued.
Miller stated to the audience, “poetry can be whatever you want it to be.”
“You could see poetry in a chair, you could see poetry in a poem, you could hear poetry in a song. Anything that moves you, that motivates you to heal or to heal other people, I feel like is poetry,” she continued. “So as cliché as it sounds, I truly do believe that poetry can be anything and everything, and you define poetry,” Miller said, concluding the evening with roaring applause and many students asking for pictures and autographs.
Annelise Kloster can be contacted at akloster@keene-equinox.com