The Type

Sarah Kay

“My father is a wonderful, brilliant photographer. He is also not an educated man — he barely graduated from high school, he’s extremely dyslexic, almost to the point of having trouble with literacy. He somehow managed to be a very successful businessman for all his life, but he’s not well-read. And when I first started writing poetry, something that was immensely important to me was that I not write poetry that alienated my father. I did not want to write poetry that made my dad feel stupid — I wanted to write poetry that made him laugh or made him cry or that he was otherwise able to engage with. And that desire — to make poetry that had an access point for someone who was not necessarily in the same education space that I was — was really important to me.”

A conversation with poet Sarah Kay about how we measure creative success, as individuals and as a culture – more at the link: