Sarah Kay Quotes

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.

I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.

That's how I always try to start my thoughts. I write them down first, eventually it turns into a poem, and if I feel like composing something to it, then I do that.

"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.

A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.

Malander had an idea and was trying to work it out, but it would take him time. Sometimes people never saw things clearly until it was too late and they no longer had the strength to start again. Or else they forgot their idea along the way and didn't even realise that they forgotten.

I trust in my inspiration, really, and that's difficult because sometimes you would rather be technical. And once you empty your mind, empty your brain, it's really incredible. I'm very caring about things that dash into my brain, and I make sure I don't just clog it.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

But the only rhyme he could summon for 'out' was 'sauerkraut,' which lacked poetic glory. He let it go. The right line would come in time. That was the thing about poetry. It crept up through the draws and coulees of the brain.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do" "Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

I hate everything approaching temperamental inspiration,'sacred fire'and all those attributes of genius which serve only as cloaks for untidy minds.

Every poem that I write is, in a sense, trying to find adequate words for this unspeakable word, around which my entire life turns.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

It's hard if you're just touring constantly. It's like, "What am I going to write about? I'm in the van, I'm playing another show..." I'm still writing about heartbreak that happened years ago. I don't see the point of writing and putting out another record until I can do something else.

As a creative person, you need to sort of spread your wings and try different things out because each one really does inform the other.

In fact, when I come up with an idea for a parody I try to resist the urge to Google the idea to see if someone has done it already because the answer is almost always, "Yes, of course they have, they've thought of it!"

The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

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.