Sarah Kay Quotes

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

The play is not in the words, it's in you!

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

It's impossible to have a favourite Shakespeare, since so many of the plays rouse and inspire completely different parts of your being.

That's my favorite part about songwriting, the way you write a song, and someone else might hear it a different way.

It's very important to me that every person takes away their own meaning from a song, and it's why I don't always love spelling out what a song is about for somebody.

When I read a book, it's Lou Reed's voice narrating it.

It is very difficult to explain poetry. You have to understand the poetry and figure out your own take and your relatability.

And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

Music, I think, he makes me feel like music

All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, “here it is.

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

I don't expect everyone to get something deep out of it. Some people can just listen to the music, or get their aggressions out, but I think with any great painting or movie, album or whatever it is, it's better if people can take what they need from it. That they're not forced to get some particular message.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

I don't think I ever wrote a song. I can write a lot of jokes, but when I try to write lyrics they're the most direct, non-figurative words, like, 'I like you, I like you,'... and that's it, for the whole song. People would go, 'Ooh, this guy's Dylan or something.' It gives me a lot more respect for songwriters, actually.

I feel like making music because - and this has much to do with the way I was able to make this record - there's more of myself in it.

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.