From the Page to the Stage
Medel, TJ

TJ: I first started writing when I was a freshman in high school and I first started writing because I wanted to impress girls. My English teacher at the time just told me that I had this gift; he didn't know what it was but he knew that I loved writing so he introduced me to like "God's Hand" and all that. I wasn't really appreciating it that much but then my best friend told me about slam poetry; I didn't know what it was all about but there was this whole slam at a college somewhere and I went and I thought that it would just be some crazy old reading and I didn't want to share, I just wanted to watch the first time and I'll never forget his name, his name is Uncle Shappy. He was on HBO a def poetry jam and he did what I would like to call, or what he would like to call "geek poetry" and then from there poetry just had a whole new meaning to me. I actually saw that poetry could be fun. When I got deeper into it and started to learn what poetry could be, not just what I thought it was, I started lifting off, I sought out like to go to open mikes and to go to slams and I started writing a whole lot more and then I got discovered by HBO def poets, Big Mike, Flomentos, Gemini, and they started teaching me things that I never knew about poetry like the humility that you have to learn to go around and know that you're a person before a performing poet and then from there it was just nothing but uplifting. At seventeen and eighteen I would be going into schools and speaking about my experience and motivating kids and inspiring my own peers to just go ahead and write poetry and to not just write it but take if from the page to the stage and perform it. I was an actor first but now I'm a poet forever because of that experience and now ever since, I've taken that and molded it and turned it into my own to become a performance poet, to be an all time spoken work artist. It's just amazing and now that I tech it in schools and now that I'm a little bit older and I'm a lot more mature, I can finally say to kids that for the past fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, years of your life you've been trained to speak by asking permission but when I look them in the eyes and I tell them, "Well what if I took away that hand-raising and I gave them a mike and an amp and audience and a venue." What would they say? No holds barred and all my students that I teach now look at me and they just go in awe and amazement and shock because they'll never know who wants to listen to them and when my mentors wanted to listen to me, I wanted to show everybody else that I wanted to listen to them and not only that, I want the world to listen to them. I want the masses to listen to them. So now I run my own nonprofit organization, it's called Poets in the Streets, we're going into schools, we're promoting slam poetry, spoken word poetry, the art of the word being spoken because honestly living, breathing poets are hard to come by nowadays, especially the one that are in it for the message and not for the money. Here I am trying to be humble in this really sick game that we live in called the business and trying to give back to my art form by teaching it to the youth and praying to God that the youth find out that the appreciation of the art as opposed to the acceptance of it is the most important thing to them. To me, poetry is not just a job, it's not a living, it's my air, I need to breath with it. If I had a choice whether or not to breathe, well I'm pretty sure I would choose to breathe because sometimes you have that choice and you have got to make that choice to go that far to live. So poetry to me is like air, I choose to breathe it in and I have to breathe it out so that somebody else can take it and breathe it in too.