Lyn Patterson: 'Reddit User Pi'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

Throughout April we are mixing it up in honor of National Poetry Month. We’ll be bringing you one poem each week from a Bay Area poet with an upcoming reading.

Lyn Patterson was scrolling on Reddit when she found the inspiration for her poem “Reddit User Pi.” The post was a science question, and the response drew Patterson’s attention. It was “just a little chaotic and unhinged, but at the same time, so beautiful and so poetic,” she said.

The interplay between science and poetry captivated her.

“Science is about looking for answers in a very logical, methodical sense. And I think that poetry is about looking for answers in a very emotional, and feeling sense,” she said. “We sometimes see science as being more legitimate than poetry, but it’s like, everything is poetry! Everything is about making sense of things and about the intersections of what is real and what we understand and what we don’t.”

Patterson grew up in Seattle but now lives in Oakland. She recently graduated from Mills College at Northeastern University with a degree in book arts and creative writing.

“Oakland is such a special place as a Black creator,” she said. “Being able to be in a space where there’s been so much activism and history of people coming from all over the country to come to Oakland specifically … I think that’s something that’s really motivating and exciting for me in being here.”

Patterson says she started writing poetry when she was in first grade as a way to process challenging experiences and emotions. She started performing her poetry publicly more recently.

“Even though I was using it to process all of these things, I was holding onto a lot of that emotion by not sharing it with people,” she reflected. “Every time I said those poems, I could just own those experiences.”

Building community spaces for poetry performance is now a big part of Patterson’s life. She works for Gold Beams, an Oakland-based organization that hosts open mics geared toward Black creatives on the second Monday of each month. She also hosts another open mic, called The Other Open Mic, every fourth Monday at Wolfe Pack Studios. She’ll be performing there tomorrow night, Monday, April 24, at 6 p.m.