Spoken-Word Poet Olivia Gatwood on Making Personal Memories Universally Relatable
“When I was 10 years old, we did a unit on poetry in school. I was just completely drawn to it and understood it,” Olivia Gatwood explains her proclivity for poetry and writing as if it were meant for her and she for it. “When I learned about spoken word poetry at 16, it was sort of like one of those things that felt like it had been invented for me,” she goes on to say. For Gatwood, it was as if an entire world opened up for her. “I was like, ‘Wait, I’ve been writing and reading my poems aloud forever, that’s already what I do... what do you mean there’s this whole world where people do that and they compete and there are whole venues for it and there are open mic nights?’” Since then, Gatwood has amassed millions of views on YouTube videos of her performances, tens of thousands of social media followers, and has written two books: the first titled New American Best Friend, which released in 2017, and the second titled Life of the Party, which is set to release this August.
“Poetry has taught me that the way that I think and understand the world has a place and has a value. Everyone has their way of communicating with the world, whether that be as an architect or as a lawyer or as a waitress, and the way that I communicate with the world is through poetry.”
When Gatwood gets started on a poem or a project, she starts with her own experiences. “Memory is big for me,” Gatwood explains. “When I show up to a poem, I’m usually asking a question; I’m usually trying to figure out why something is still living inside of me. Like, ‘why is this memory still clawing at me?’ That usually means that there’s a story to tell. I get all the points, every quote, and piece of dialogue that I remember, every emotion that I remember. So I think when I go to a poem I’m taking all of those files and I’m trying to do something beautiful with them.” What’s so special about Gatwood’s poems is that these moments, her memories, aren’t huge experiences. Instead, she has mastered the art of taking small, specific moments from her life and making them universally relatable. “I think that seems counterintuitive,” Gatwood says, “but it makes a lot of sense when you think about vivid description as a tool for helping place someone somewhere. When you give someone a scent and you give someone a color and you give someone the sound of a voice, they can either put themselves there by using their imagination or they can kind of point to the various things in their life that might remind them of it.” In sharing her experiences in this way, Gatwood is able to relate more closely to her readers. “That’s how we relate to each other,” she continues, “through these small details that spark something in our brains.”
Gatwood uses her poems to speak candidly about herself and her life. “I think sometimes when you’re a public figure, you get sort of pigeon-holed into whatever content people have access to and then people build a story around that,” she says. “So if you have five poems on YouTube, or whatever, that’s what people understand about who you are. But that can be complicated because the other side of that is that you feel like you have to share every aspect of your identity in order for people to know who you are holistically.”
A big part of the identity Gatwood has created includes her sexuality and place in the queer community. “I do identify as queer, and I want younger girls and young readers that are queer or think they might be to know and see that,” she explains, “but also, being a role model is a complicated thing because you suddenly have this responsibility to your readership.” For Gatwood, her queerness is only one facet of herself and isn’t something she wanted to market. “If you’re not writing about being in queer relationships or having queer sex,” she says, “you’re not considered a queer poet, and the default is that you’re a straight poet.” But Gatwood understands that identity is so much more than that. She doesn’t limit herself to taking up only one space or fitting into one box. “I wanted to write freely about my experiences in the world. I talk so candidly and openly and fluidly about sexuality because of how I feel inside of my own sexuality, so that’s sort of the way that I’ve approached it. I’m just writing about my relationships and my love.”
“It’s amazing when a story that you are telling just because you’re trying to be honest ends up being an anthem for someone else.”
In doing so, Gatwood has been able to positively influence the lives of her readers, especially young girls experiencing the same questions she had when figuring out her own sexuality. “I have poems about experimenting with girls when I was young and what that says about queerness, and I’ve had a lot of young women say they’ve never seen that reflected anywhere and it made them realize they’re not gross. I think that means I’m doing something right because that’s why I read when I was young, so I could feel less alone and feel less crazy,” Gatwood says. “It’s amazing when a story that you are telling just because you’re trying to be honest ends up being an anthem for someone else.”
Although Gatwood has written quite a bit about her sexuality, many of the poems in her first book were about girlhood and growing up. For Gatwood, a lot of that meant trying to fit herself into a boy’s world. “I think that actually was the sole root of all of my problems,” she says. “I was convinced that being in a room full of boys and being the best girl made me the best... but, the reality was, at the end of the day, I was still just a girl. In many ways, I was still disposable, and I had to learn that the hard way. I never was safe, and I thought that I could earn my safety, but one thing I had to learn was that you shouldn’t have to earn safety. You should just feel safe around the people who say they love you. You shouldn’t have to prove your worth.”
When approaching her second book, Gatwood grappled heavily with this feeling of women being unsafe around men. “The book is full of poems about the obsession with women’s murder in the media and where fear comes from and how fear lives in the psyche of women when we’re kind of subject to the fetishization of our own deaths all the time,” she explains. “I’d been consuming a ton of true-crime. I had just gotten really into it. I’ve always been into it, but I had especially gotten on a pretty heavy kick, and it was really affecting me emotionally. I was kind of staying up all night and waiting until the sun rose before I would let myself go to sleep. I was locking all my windows, and I just suddenly felt really vulnerable all the time.”
Gatwood explains that her fear is what drove her to write Life of the Party. “I think there are many poems in Life of the Party about feeling unsafe around men, and that lends itself to understanding why I have these different fears and anxieties when walking through the world. There’s one poem in the book about all the times men laughed while I was afraid or when men laughed at me while they were committing violence against me, the kind of paradox that they’re experiencing joy while I’m experiencing extreme terror, and how you can be so far from another person that’s in the same room as you.”
However, for Gatwood, poetry isn’t only her job, it’s a way to release those things that are eating away at her. “That’s the other beautiful thing about writing for me,” she says. “I use it to figure things out, and once I figure something out, I can move on from it. I think, with Life of the Party, I kind of needed to write the book in order to understand both my fascination with this genre and also my fear of it. Once I was able to understand it, I could move on. It’s not taking over my life anymore.”
Olivia Gatwood was born to be a poet, and her work has not only helped her readers and fans, but it’s helped her become the person she is. “I think I’m always thinking in very small moments and then trying to figure out how to put them into words, which is just a poem. I think I’ve always sort of processed the world like a poet. Poetry has changed my life because it gave me my life. It’s what I do, it’s how I pay my bills, it’s how I’ve made many of my closest friends. Poetry has taught me that the way that I think and understand the world has a place and has a value. Everyone has their way of communicating with the world, whether that be as an architect or as a lawyer or as a waitress, and the way that I communicate with the world is through poetry.”
STORY GINA DECICCO
PHOTOS ASHLEY KIM