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Long before Jessie Reyez was celebrated for her voice, poetry was the Toronto-raised musician’s “first love.”
The Grammy-nominated and Juno Award winner’s music often sounds like spoken poetry, backed by a blend of R&B, hip-hop and pop. Latin Beats. When music, and the commercial demands of the industry, fail to satisfy her creative hunger, Reyez turns to writing and often demands millions from it. Instagram Adherents to poetic allusions.
She compiled some of those poems, previously available only on a 24-hour Instagram Story timeline, into a book to be released Tuesday, “The People’s Purge: Words of a Goat Princess Volume II.”
The exercise, which Reyes now does weekly, allows her to create and release almost instantly and it feels as if “there’s an itch in the middle of my brain that I can’t reach,” she told The Associated Press.
Reyez said, “When you’re lucky enough to have a job in creativity and you’re getting paid for your art, it can lead to you making a poor version of what you’re creating. Some degree of purity is jeopardized.” “You really have to be the security guard of your art.”
Reyez wrote about “Breadcrumbs” and “Air”. Other prompts are specific, such as one titled, “Tapping your toe on the table when you were having a good day.” The signs are limitless, Reyez said. “It’s like taking a snapshot of the emotional state of the world.”
It’s been a busy year for Reyez, which is emblematic of his continued creative flow. She has been on tour since the beginning of June for her latest album, “Paid in Memories”. She began a US book tour this month and will return to the international leg of her music tour in November.
She recently spoke about her upcoming book, the freedom that poetry provides and how she protects her creative flow.
Comments have been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: How is writing poetry different from writing songs?
Reyez: Writing has always been my first love. Poem Music has been my love before. I like the idea of the release. I like the idea of freedom. Freedom feels like home to me. Although as a musician I love composing, when you’re creating a song, you have musical limitations for the lyrics and the melody. There are still more rules that you have to follow. But I feel most free when I write and I’m not beholden to the fence of notes or the melody of the song I’m in.
AP: Why did you decide to collect the poems into a book?
Reyez: I love the ephemeral nature of them when I’m creating them. But, because it’s such a community thing, there were people who were like, “I wish I was here for this. I wish we could keep this.” It became more and more clear to me that this is a team thing. I wanted to make sure that people, you know, could keep up with what I created.
AP: How did you choose which poems to include?
Reyez: I’ve become very good at objectively criticizing myself. For music, it’s a little more difficult because the thing is that music can sometimes act like makeup. If you take a great song and read it, it should be powerful enough to sound like a beautiful poem without any music. That’s what I like when I play with words. It becomes more clear what’s done well versus what’s going to hit the cutting room floor.
AP: One of the poems is entirely in Spanish and your Colombian heritage shines throughout the book. Did it come naturally?
Reyez: It’s not something I have to be cognizant of because it’s naturally in me. It’s in my blood, it’s in my heart, it’s in my soul, it’s in the way I love. Although Spanish is my first language – it is the language in which I learned to be human, it is the language in which I learned to love – it is not a language I studied. The library of words I can learn from is much larger in English, so by default my output is more in English.
AP: Some signals are highly specific and others are vague. How did this affect your writing process?
Reyez: There isn’t one that I like more than the other. I really enjoy the whole process because it’s challenging both ways. When it’s specific, it’s a challenge because you have to dig a little deeper to find it. I think everyone has that ability. You just need to learn how to open the box, how to dig into it, and then you will be able to find a lot of the same things and a lot of things that you and I have gone through. It’s like a different shade of blue, but it’s still blue.
AP: I really enjoyed how you flipped some of the signals that came into their heads. For example, a prompt asked for a poem about “big butts” and you wrote about buts as a hesitation in relationships. Was that intentional?
Reyez: I do it a lot. That’s the method to find out how it relates to you, do you know what I mean? “Big Butts” is a good one. I love that you remembered him as an example. I like the idea of playing. I like the idea of challenge. Sometimes, I feel like the person is almost like, “In what world is she going to make something with a sign like that,” you know?
AP: You do this exercise about once a week. I am sure you have written many more poems. Could there be more iterations of this book in the future?
Reyez: Yes, maybe. It’s really funny, because the day we turned it on, I practiced again. A week after the deadline, I practiced again. I really had to show some restraint. Yell for deadlines. Deadlines are a gift to the creative because otherwise it would be a never-ending book. We will see. If it has to happen, then of course.