Long before Jessie Reyez was celebrated for her voice, poetry was the Toronto-bred musician's “first love.”
The Grammy-nominated and Juno Award winner’s music often feels like spoken poetry, backed by a mix of R&B, hip-hop and Latin beats. When music, and the commercial demands of the industry, fail to satiate her creative hunger, Reyez turns to writing and often asks her millions of Instagram followers for poetry prompts.
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She compiled some of those poems, previously only available on a 24-hour Instagram story timeline, into a book, “The People’s Purge: Words of a Goat Princess Volume II,” releasing Tuesday.
The exercise, which Reyez now does weekly, allows her to create and release almost instantly and felt like scratching “an itch in the middle of my brain that I can’t reach,” she told The Associated Press.
“When you’re fortunate enough to find a job in creativity and you’re getting paid for your art, it can create this bastardized version of what you’re making. Some of the purity is jeopardized,” Reyez said. “You really have to be your art’s security guard.”
Reyez has written about “Breadcrumbs” and “Air." Other prompts are specific, like one titled, “Stubbing your toe on the table when you were having a good day.” The prompts are boundless, Reyez said. "It’s like having a snapshot of the world's emotional state.”
This year has been a busy one for Reyez, emblematic of the her non-stop creative flow. She has been on tour since early June for her latest album, “Paid in Memories.” She began a U.S. book tour this month and will return to the international leg of her musical tour in November.
She recently spoke about her upcoming book, the freedom that poetry offers and how she protects her creative flow.
Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: How does writing poetry differ from writing songs?
REYEZ: Writing has always been my first love. Poetry has been my love before music. I like the idea of release. I love the idea of freedom. Freedom feels like home for me. Even though I love creating as a musician, when you are creating a song, you have the boundaries of the music around it for the lyrics and for the melody. There’s just more rules that you have to abide by. But I feel the most free when I write and I’m not beholden to the fences of the chords of the song that I’m in, or to the melody of the song that I'm in.
AP: Why did you decide to compile the poems into a book?
REYEZ: I love the ephemeral nature of them when I’m making it. But, because it is such a community thing, there were people that started to be like, “I wish I was here for it. I wish we can keep it.” It became more apparent to me that this is a team thing. I wanted to make sure that people could, you know, hold what they’ve made in tandem with me.
AP: How did you choose which poems were included?
REYEZ: I’ve become very skilled at objectively critiquing myself. For music, it’s a little bit more difficult because the thing is, music can act like makeup sometimes. If you take a great song and you read it, it should be strong enough to be able to sound like a beautiful poem without having any music. That’s kind of what I love when I play with words. It just becomes that much more apparent what is well done versus what is going to hit the cutting room floor.
AP: One of the poems is completely in Spanish and your Colombian heritage shines throughout the book. Did that come naturally?
REYEZ: It’s not so much something that I have to be cognizant of because it’s naturally in me. It is in my blood, it’s in my heart, it is in my soul, it's in the way I love. However, as much as Spanish is my first language — it's the language I learned to be human in, it was the language that I learned love in — it’s not the language which I studied. The library of words that I can pull from is just a lot larger in English, so by default my output is more in English.
AP: Some of the prompts are super specific and others are vague. How did that impact your writing process?
REYEZ: There is not one that I like more than the other. I literally just love the entire process because it’s challenging in both ways. When it’s specific, it’s a challenge because you have to dig a little bit deeper to find it. I think everybody has that ability. You just need to learn how to like open the box, dig in, and then you’re able to find so many things in common and so many thing that you and I went through. It’s like a different shade of blue, but it’s still blue.
AP: I really enjoyed how you flipped some of the prompts on their head. For instance, one prompt asked for a poem about “Big butts,” and you wrote about buts, as in hesitations in a relationship. Was that intentional?
REYEZ: I do it a lot. That's the method of finding how it relates to you, you know what I mean? “Big Butts” is a good one. I love that you recalled that one as an example. I love the idea of play. I love the idea of challenge. Every now and then, I get one where it feels like the person is almost like, "In what world is she gonna make something with a prompt like that," you know?
AP: You do this exercise about once a week. I’m sure you’ve written many more poems. Are there more iterations of this book that might come in the future?
REYEZ: Yeah, maybe. It’s really funny, because the day we turned it in, I did the exercise again. The week after the deadline, I did the exercise again. I really had to show some restraint. Shout out to deadlines. Deadlines are the gift of the creative because otherwise this would have been a never-ending book. We’ll see. If it’s meant to be, sure.