The first time I ever performed spoken word poetry in front of a big crowd, it totally failed. It ended, people barely clapped…in retrospect the poem was terrible. And for a while I thought this was something I would never do again. And then I realized that, in my 17-year-old head, that was the worst it could have been. And it wasn’t that bad – [because] from there, it could only get better. And I think that failure kind of freed me up to explore and not be afraid of failing again.
