Sarah Daly is an Irish writer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sarah has written songs, stories, and poems for as long as she can remember, and is also a screenwriter with the British Horror Studio, which she co-founded with director Lawrie Brewster. Her poetry has featured in an Emmy-award-winning YouTube show, and been performed by legendary actor Gary Oldman. Sarah’s first collection of poetry is due to be released later this year.

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Which poets influence you the most?

Honestly, I try to avoid being too influenced by others. Originality is the most important part of expression to me, and so I fear that if I expose myself to too much poetry, I’ll start to emulate other poets, or to unwittingly sound like them.

Undoubtedly, though, the poetry I read or encountered as a child and teenager influenced me to want to write poetry in the first place, and has had an effect on my style. Lewis Carroll was massively formative in terms of how he played with language. It was exciting and inspiring to realize that you could essentially invent your own words and that you really didn’t have to be bound by the rules of the English language.

As an angsty teenager, Emily Dickinson had a big impact. Her work inspired me to write poems that were cathartic and personal and sort of gave me permission to go to dark places with my poems.

What’s your favorite word, and why is it your favorite?

Sesquipedalian, which is a word for people who use a lot of long words. I just love the inherent irony of it, as well as the way it sounds. It sorts of skips around your mouth!

What has writing poetry informed you about being a person? How has it shaped you as a human being?

As a very private person who struggles to express her emotions in ‘real life’, poetry is vital to me. Poems are a place for me to put my feelings. It allows me to wrangle ugly, complicated, lonely thoughts into some kind of structure, maybe even turn them into something beautiful. Quite often, I’ll revisit an old poem of mine and realize it was actually me sending a message to myself, in a way that the fully conscious, logical mind probably never could, sort of like how dreams give us vital information about ourselves. Through my poems, I can see who I am.

And, beyond myself, it helps me to feel more connected to others. When you share something personal, and someone else reaches out to say they feel the same way, or they understand, or it spoke to them, then you feel more connected and less alone. It’s also wonderful to know that my being honest and vulnerable meant that someone else was able to feel less alone in their own experience. This was a somewhat unexpected effect of sharing my poems, but a very beautiful one.

What do you think your childhood self would think of your poetry today?

In a lot of ways, my poetry hasn’t changed that much! It’s improved, I hope, but it has a lot of the same themes, and a similar perspective. My poems are often dark, but always with a strand of hope. They can veer into comedy but usually with something serious to say. I’ve always been particularly sensitive to injustice, fakeness, and hypocrisy, so those are topics I’ve been drawn to speak about for as long as I can remember.

Basically, I think young me would be pleased to see that my core values hadn’t really changed, and honestly, I think she’d just be happy to know that I was still writing at all. It’s certainly not a given that your childhood creativity survives into adulthood.

When did you discover you were a poet? How did that process begin?

I don’t think it was ever a process, just an impulse. I’m pretty sure I was writing stories, songs, and poems as soon as words were available to me–before I could even write them down actually. I remember coming up with songs when I was three years old, singing along to my toy piano. I’m sure it was pretty awful, but it just always came naturally to me to arrange words into pleasing structures and rhythms. 

That said, it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve felt in any way comfortable with the idea of calling myself a poet. This is the first time in my life I’ve really focussed on poetry in such a purposeful, sustained way. I’ve done a lot of different kinds of writing in my life, and always will, but it feels like “poet” is the best fit to describe the kind of writer I am.

Why do you believe poetry matters?

At its best, poetry can make life’s heaviness a little lighter, it can make us feel seen and understood, can turn difficult, ugly things into beautiful ones, can make us look at the world just a bit differently, and elevate us beyond the base, petty, and mundane parts of the world and ourselves. Poetry is philosophy made pretty. It’s the perfect vessel for truth and beauty, and right now, I think humanity needs both of those things more than ever.

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I Speak Poetry

My mouth and mind
were made to weave words
into something more than meaning
something leaning ever
towards beauty

Bleeding truth
out of the spaces
between
sentences.
(The silences at times
are loaded, golden
speaking louder than sound)

Each syllable I spit
is chosen for its peace
or for its power
for its grace or for its grit
I sit with the blank page
and I commit to making the mundane profound

Some poems meant to pierce
and some to soothe
to render safe
or to make dangerous
to shrink the whole life
into a phrase
or blow a moment
up into a universe

Eternity
preserved into a stanza
Forever
whittled to a single word
an ageless expression
of human feeling
healing even as it hurts

Yes, I speak poetry
but I am not unique
every child
was born a poet
both complete
with the sacred, ancient
holy language
every open heart
can speak.

-Sarah Daly

Isabelle Palerma