Long before Jessie Reyez gained recognition for her music, her first love was poetry. The artist from Toronto, celebrated with Grammy nominations and Juno Awards, often intertwines her musical endeavors with her poetic roots. Reyez's music blends R&B, hip-hop, and Latin beats while retaining the essence of spoken poetry. When the constraints of the music industry limit her creative expression, she turns to poetry, frequently engaging her millions of Instagram followers for prompts.
Reyez has compiled a collection of her poetry, previously shared only through a 24-hour Instagram story timeline, into a book titled The People’s Purge: Words of a Goat Princess Volume II, which is set to be released on Tuesday. This innovative exercise has now become a weekly routine for Reyez, providing her with a creative outlet that feels like fulfilling a deep, intrinsic need for expression. "When you’re fortunate enough to find a job in creativity…. Some of the purity is jeopardized," Reyez explains, emphasizing her need to safeguard the integrity of her art.
Throughout her creative journey, Reyez has tackled various prompts—some broad and others strikingly specific, like 'Stubbing your toe on the table when you were having a good day.' She enjoys the diverse and boundless nature of these prompts, describing them as "a snapshot of the world’s emotional state." This year has been particularly busy for Reyez, as she has been on tour since June for her latest album, Paid in Memories, and is commencing a U.S. book tour this month, with plans to resume her international tour in November.
In a recent interview, Jessie Reyez shared insights into her writing process and the creative freedom poetry provides. She remarked, "Writing has always been my first love… I feel the most free when I write." Unlike songwriting, which can be restricted by musical boundaries, poetry offers her complete liberation in expression. She attributed her decision to compile the poems into a book to the community aspect of her work, recognizing that her audience wanted to engage with and cherish her creations beyond the ephemeral nature of social media. "It became more apparent to me that this is a team thing," she noted.
When curating the poems for the book, Reyez relied on her evolved skill of self-evaluation. She acknowledged that while music can sometimes mask the integrity of lyrics, the strength of a poem should stand alone. "If you take a great song and you read it, it should be strong enough to sound like a beautiful poem without any music," she explained. This objective critique allowed her to discern which poems merited inclusion in the book.
Significantly, Reyez's Colombian heritage influences her work; one of the poems is entirely in Spanish. She shared that her connection to the Spanish language feels natural, imbued with cultural depth and emotion. However, she candidly pointed out that her literary output is more frequent in English due to her broader vocabulary in that language.
Discussing the nature of her prompts, Reyez expressed that she values both specific and vague inspirations equally, finding challenges in both realms. "I literally just love the entire process because it’s challenging in both ways," she stated. Her unique take on prompts allows her to explore deeper meanings and connections, as seen in her playful re-interpretation of a prompt about 'Big butts,' where she reflects on hesitations in relationships instead.
Reyez's ongoing commitment to this weekly poetry exercise leads her to create continuously, generating an abundance of work. She humorously noted, "The day we turned it in, I did the exercise again," indicating the perpetual flow of her creativity. Acknowledging the important role of deadlines in the creative process, she teased that there may be more iterations of her poetry collection in the future, demonstrating her endless passion for writing.
