Sarah Kay Quotes
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There is hurt that cannot be fixed by band aids or poetrybecause no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.
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Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.
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Spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers or your community who will listen.
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I write poetry to figure things out. It's what I use as a navigating tool in my life, so when there's something that I just can't understand, I have to "poem" my way through it. For that reason I write a lot about family, because my family confuses me and I'm always trying to figure them out. I write a lot about love, because love is continually confusing in all of its many glorious aspects.
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Every moment I choose to write about is one I have deemed important enough to dwell inside of and share with others. I am holding this moment up to the light and saying, "Wow, will you look at that?"
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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.
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Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made, the ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night.
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Some people read palms to tell your future, but I read hands to tell your past. Each scar makes a story worth telling. Each callused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory.
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Ever since I was little, I’ve loved making hand-made cards and presents and arts & crafts for people. The book gives me a similar experience. I love being able to hold this object in my hands and say, “This is mine. I made this. It is a gift for you.” I love that feeling. Especially since this particular object contains ten years worth of my poems.
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I write about love and family a lot, because I'm always trying to figure those things out. At different points in my life, just when I think I've finished writing about it, the dynamics shift, and then I have a whole new set of questions and worries and misunderstandings to wrestle with.
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It is equally important to listen as it is to speak.
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I fell in love with poetry through storytelling, so my poetry tends to be fairly narrative. I like characters, I like having a beginning, middle, and ending, though not necessarily in that order.
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Fingers interlocked like a beautiful accordion of flesh or a zipper of prayer
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I think there is a human instinct to tell stories, no matter who you are or where you live.
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Hands learn more than minds do, hands learn how to hold other hands.
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I want my daughter to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind.
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Nothing is as universal as some good scatalogical humor. I try to shift the frame in which people think about poetry from being distant or "sacred" to being more human, because then I think it becomes easier to feel like poetry belongs to us, is for us, is from us.
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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.
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I write poems to figure things out
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You can be an artist, work hard for your work and also share while trying to create community with other artists.
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I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I’m trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.
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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.