She may have learned this from reading Allen Ginsberg or Diane Wakoski, or from taking to heart the encouragement of some especially hip teacher in the English department of whatever high school she must have graduated from only a year or two ago. Epiphanies appear and disappear in Tyler's long poems. It depends on the epiphanies. Neither quite knows how to turn the other one on. Even poetry of the exclamatory sort is afraid to make too much noise in bed with dance.
Dance makes poetry feel like a fuddy-duddy, and poetry makes dance feel like a ditz.
Personally, I need the kind of music that lifts me from the kitchen floor I'm swabbing clean with ragged towels some rainy Sunday in April, a jazz riff, a folk ballad, or a rock jam that beckons me into the middle room for a full-bodied groove across the bare wooden floor. Whether it's the Alvin Ailey troupe dancing to Otis Redding songs or Mark Morris' dancing to Handel, I don't care. I'm infected by the exhilaration of the dancers exulting to the music, serving the moods and stories suggested by the music with moves that the shocked audience to a person recognizes with applause at the end. I see Sarah Tyler working herself up into that moment all by herself, making personal poems that are connected to the public experience like stems to the orange caps of toadstools that green toads crouch under for shelter. And several days later I still see Kelley Donovan, in bold and joyful crimson and purple, working to create that liminal atmosphere in Killian Hall to a recording of postmodern rainforest music by composer Michael Oster.