Meet poet Michaela Kabat
Spoken-word artist Michaela Kabat is the first poet to be featured on the No Simple Disruption podcast. She grew up in Asheville, N.C. where she started writing at age 8. “I was allowed to do it in class,” she explains. “Poetry, for a long time, has been a way for me to put into words things that are very abstract.”
Michaela is currently in college near the Rocky Mountains. But while still in Asheville she was approached by Jeff Firewalker Schmitt — a No Simple Disruption co-founder and Kabat family friend — to submit a social justice-related poem to the podcast project.
Photo of Michaela Kabat, courtesy of the poet
Yes, she had poems. Social justice issues “bring up a lot of fear and a lot of anger and a lot of complex emotions that are hard to chew on and get through,” Michael says. “For me growing up in a society that was so inundated with information, so surrounded by social media and social justice, there were two sides. There was the positive side of ‘I’m glad people are trying to make change’ and the negative side of ‘Why are we at this place and why are people not participating in my understanding of justice?”
As a child, she says, there was and right and wrong, and when people weren’t doing the right thing, it was hard to wrap her mind around. “For me, poetry was a way for me to do that. Of course, my understanding has become more complex, but it’s still a way for me to wrap my head around why people are doing the things they’re doing and why we are where we are.”
Though poetry, for Michaela, has often been private, the piece she submitted to No Simple Disruption is one of her more public poems. “I felt like it needed to be shared,” she says.
The No Simple Disruption idea is to take a poem by a young spoken word artist and create a musical score for the piece. Michaela says she wasn’t involved with the music creation, “but when I heard it, it was wonderful,” she says. “I didn’t know what to expect, but it felt like a really cool creation in the end. I haven’t done a lot of collaborative art and it was cool to be part of a collaboration.”
She says that she things her writing style has changed a lot in the last year and has been shifting to more public themes — ideas she’ll likely want to share. That could lead to more collaborations in the future. The No Simple Disruption project was “very exciting to get that start in collaborative work.”
“The social justice movements these days cannot be silenced,” Michaela says. “I think we’re at a point where many people are angry, many people are aware there’s injustice, and many people don’t know what to do about it. It’s important to start those conversations between generations, between different groups. To start discussing where we go from here, how we do this in a positive way, how we deal with the anger and fear that arise. And how do we do this in a way that’s meaningful to the greater world?” And that’s why, she says, projects like the No Simple Disruption podcast are so important.