Rape and molestation survivor, Jessica Holter talks about overcoming sexual abuse while living in Foster Care in Oakland, CA. She says it is the power of the pen, that saved her life. She wrote Revolution of a Poet as a testament to her salvation from self prosecution. "I never got the chance to build a healthy relationship with sex. It was raped and molested out of me. But I understand a lot about love. And like many fans of The Punany Poets, that's my theater program, I am still searching for the answers to my sexual questions and insecurities. Only now, I find happiness in a healthy type of search. I'm not looking for my orgasm at the bottom of the bottle or in bathroom stalls with strangers. I am not confusing abuse with attention. Poetry, quite literally, has saved my life."
Jessica Holter is also known as Ghetto Girl Blue, because of the depression that drove her to the microphone. In this video, she performs "Revolution of a Poet" with passion at Sanford Meisner Theater, New York City. Though best known as the creator of The Punany Poets, a sex education theater project.
This autobiographical piece, about overcoming sexual abuse, is one of the writer's most provocative. The poem appears in the book Verbal Penetration and in the production Speak the Unspeakable by Ghetto Girl Blue.
Jessica Holter is from Oakland, California.
