On a recent Sunday, the spoken-word poets Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye sat on couches in their dressing room at the Bell House, a Brooklyn concert venue, and composed a set list for their sold-out show. “I would like to do ‘Postcards,’ but we’ll see,” Kay, who wore red lipstick and a varsity jacket, said.
Kaye, whose thin beard and flowing hair earn him comparisons to Jesus, nodded. “It’d be nice to hear it again,” he said. “Is that the one with the tug-of-war metaphor?”
“Yeah,” Kay said.
“It’s a banger!”
She laughed. “Thanks, bruh!”
Kay and Kaye, thirty and thirty-one, are not related or married: their last names happen to be homophones. They’ve been friends since 2006, when they met during a freshman talent show at Brown. “We were both signed up to perform spoken-word poetry,” Kay recalled. They quickly discovered that they have an eerie amount in common. Both are Japanese and Jewish. Kay’s brother’s name is Philip; Kaye’s sister’s Hebrew name is Sarah. As poets, they complement each other: their writing is disarmingly earnest, but Kay’s delivery is breathy and awestruck, whereas Kaye works the crowd like a standup comedian. They have a poem, “An Origin Story,” about their remarkable friendship: “It didn’t start with us. / It started with Lennon and McCartney. / It started with Thelma and Louise. / It started with Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin. / Bert and Ernie!” It’s been viewed on YouTube more than two million times.
Kay and Kaye spend most of the year on tour, teaching poetry workshops and performing. (Their biggest show so far was in the Philippines.) When they’re not travelling, they live in Manhattan, Kay on the Upper West Side and Kaye on the Lower East Side. The Bell House show was a kind of homecoming.
Facing away from each other, they changed clothes—Kaye into a black shirt from Zara and Kay into a tweedy gray suit. With a high heel on one foot and a Nike Air Jordan on the other, she asked, “Should I go femme-y or sneaker?” Kaye picked the high heel.
The lights dimmed, and the duo took the stage. “My name is Phil Kaye,” Kaye said. “And my name is Sarah Kay,” Kay said. “And, if you didn’t know those two things, you might be lost!”
They performed two poems together, and alternated performing individually. Kaye spoke about tree-climbing, his childhood stutter, and his parents’ divorce; Kay discussed whale hearts, the Civil War, and a long-distance relationship. Kaye did an impression of the Geico gecko, and Kay recited an open letter to the person who, while breaking into her car, stole her vibrator. The audience laughed and cheered.
After “Canyon,” Kaye’s poem about losing his fluency in Japanese (“The old language has been locked / away somewhere in the house / an aging holiday decoration”), Kay told the audience, “I was going to do a poem that is, like, a little bit also in the sad department, but now I’m worried that you might need a little levity out in these streets. Do you want, like, joy? Or, like, heart?”
“Heart!” the audience roared.
Kay grinned. “Y’all want the feelings!” she said. “I feel you. Respect! Don’t lie to yourself. Like, ‘I didn’t come to this poetry show to laugh. I came here to quietly weep in the dark!’ ”
After the show, the poets signed copies of their books. The line of fans stretched to the back of the room. At the front of the line was August Eberlein, who’d come from Boston. He pulled up one of his sleeves to show a tattoo of a hand holding a dandelion, the same image that is on the cover of Kay’s book “All Our Wild Wonder.”
“Hi, August!” Kay said. She and Eberlein posed for a selfie.
A woman called her grandmother on FaceTime, so that she could meet the poets. “We used to watch ‘An Origin Story’ before dinner all the time,” the woman said, tearing up. “You got me through a lot.” Kay and Kaye gave her hugs.
Irina Kaplan and Josh Hanson, a newly married couple, brought one of Kay’s books and asked her to sign the page with “Love Poem #137,” which contained a line that they had used in their vows: “I will love you with too many commas / but never any asterisks.”
“It was a winter wedding?” Kay asked, while signing.
“August,” Hanson said.
“I was, like, ‘Bold!’ ” Kay said. ♦
