Grah Kay's Essay: The Type By Sarah Kay

Sarah Kay is an American educator, reader and a spoken poet, who was born to a Taoist mother and a Brooklynese father. She is also the founder and co-director of Project VOICE, a project whose aim is to entertain, educate, and inspire its audience. Thus, these three aims are important aspects of Kay’s poems and their effect on her audience. Throughout her poems, she tackles social issues widely present in today’s world, and her poem “The Type” is no different. Kay is the speaker of, “The Type” and throughout the poem, she is taking to individuals who identify themselves to be a woman. This is shown in the opening line when she says, “If you grow up the type of women...” Throughout this poem, Kay explores the themes of empowerment and identity, through the use of repetition and connotation. Through the frequent use of repetition, Kay puts emphasis on how women are defined in relation to males. Additionally, she also uses connotation to remind women they are more than what they are perceived to be in relation to others and they have the power to define themselves. Therefore the main idea of the poem is to perhaps remind women of their worth and inspire them to define themselves on their own terms, and not through the eyes of men or in comparison/relation to their relationship with others.

Throughout the poem, Kay also uses connotation(implied meaning) to remind women they are worth more than they are perceived to be. Thus, they need to define themselves based on their own terms. Towards the beginning of the poem, she writes, If you grow up the type of women men want to touch, you can let them touch