Sarah Kay is a professor of French at New York University.
You can only fit so many words in a postcard, only so many in a phone call, only so many into space before you forget that words are sometimes used for things other than filling emptiness.
Hiroshima”, I find a few of the lines to be very poignant yet hopeful. These lines are: “But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I’ll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed
It does not matter how strong your gravity is, we were always meant to fly.
Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
Think it's so unfair when people think that you're not a "real artist" unless you're getting paid for it. . . . I personally know so many poets that work a 9 to 5 in a cubicle and come home and write poetry. Their poetry is just as powerful and moving as anything that I've ever written, if not more.
I love books that create worlds for me that I don't want to leave. I recently lost my entire life to Haruki Murakami - 1Q84. I tell people that book ruined my life in the best possible way. I couldn't think of anything else for weeks after I read it.
Such a little thing really, a kiss. . . most people don't give it a moment's consideration. They kiss on meeting, they kiss on parting, that simple touching of flesh is taken entirely for granted as a basic human right.
Things that I have a hard time being able to fully grasp, sometimes writing the poem helps me work through it. Or I get to the end of the poem and I still haven't figured anything out, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
Sometimes I am puzzling over something for months and months and the poem gets created in small bursts and rewritten a hundred times, and chopped up and put back together, etc. Occasionally, though rarely, a poem just plops out of my head fully-formed. But always it is a blueprint of what my brain is trying to navigate at that moment.
I want to welcome folks to poetry, especially those who may have previously felt unwelcome; I want to celebrate everyone who is trying to make sense of this world through poetry the way I try to.
For some reason there's this myth that creativity - [especially] in terms of creative writing - is a gift you either have, or you don't. So when people first start writing, if they write something that's not very good, or if they try and it's difficult, they go, "Oh, I guess I don't have it. " That doesn't seem very fair, you have to try and you have to work at it. If we get scared of one bad poem and quit, that's not doing anybody any good.
I don't think it's about art being a career but it's about making sure that if art is something that you love, something that brings you joy, it's about you having a duty to find time in your life for that thing that brings you joy. . . even if it can only be a small amount.
You can be an artist, work hard for your work and also share while trying to create community with other artists.
It's really hard for me to remember all of the places that I've been but I can remember all of the delicious meals that I've ever eaten. I love traveling by way or stomach. . . and finding quiet time.
Thinking about writing as an act of celebration is sometimes a helpful framework for me. It allows me to prioritize what I want to call attention to and what I want others to know about me. It makes me ask: What is worth celebrating?
If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom," she's going to call me "Point B," because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me.
There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.
Our day-to-day lives are pretty chaotic. So in terms of the writing part, you have to get pretty disciplined about finding quiet moments and making sure you're making time for the art side, on top of all the time-consuming business side.
I have always thought of poetry as an act of celebration. Just by nature of writing a poem you are taking the time to dwell on whatever it is that you're writing about. . . you can be celebrating anger, you can be celebrating sorrow. . . you are spending the time to focus and observe and try to understand the various parts of being human.
My falling in love with spoken word poetry definitely came out of that time period where all the adults around me were failing to supply me with any answers. Everyone was too busy dealing with things that were more important. I was pretty lost and invisible. And all of a sudden, this world opened up where I could get on stage and perform in front of my peers. People would listen to me and see me, and people would say, "That thing you created was important. " And that was so validating and necessary at that specific moment.