Sy Stokes typed the words into his phone. He typed during class, on the way to dinner, and long after midnight while his roommates slept. Whenever something angered him, he’d write a line or two. One day he sat down to gather the words into a poem. It begins softly, then turns fierce as thunder. That was late summer, 2013. Mr. Stokes, then a junior at the University of California at Los Angeles, had performed his own spoken-word poetry at open-mic events. He had written lyrics about love and the mystery of beauty: "How a rat will look at a bat / Like it has the wings of an angel."

July 20, 2015 ・ From Chronicle of Higher Education