Natalie Wee

I didn’t read that much poetry as a teenager—a lot of the poems I was taught in school were very white and British and I didn’t understand any of it. I think I began enjoying poetry when I came across spoken word. I remember watching performances by Hanif Abdurraqib and Hieu Minh Nguyen on YouTube and realizing it was something I could connect to, and being amazed by their work. I only read more as an adult, and the poem I loved the most is, of course, Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.”

I was writing a lot but I didn’t think of it as something I could actually “do” until I was maybe 20! I think poetry is something I can do, but I don’t think of myself as a poet—I think that would be too limiting.

I think a lot about what Toni Cade Bambara said, “the role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.” It’s my personal belief that as human beings we should live in ways that liberate and uplift each other, and someone who writes poetry just has a tool to do that.

I was sitting in a park in the evening, watching the sky and grass around me, and I was thinking about how we demand so much more of ourselves than other natural things in the world, how we ask ourselves about purpose and "achieving" it. The entire idea of having to earn one's place in the world, usually through production, is a capitalist construct, but more than that, it already presupposes we are inherently not enough and must prove otherwise. Somehow, as I thought about all that, this poem was born.