I use poetry to help me work through what I don’t understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I’ve been.

Kay frames poetry as a tool for inquiry rather than certainty: writing becomes a way to “work through” confusion, grief, or complexity that resists straightforward explanation. At the same time, she rejects the myth of the blank-slate artist. Each new poem is shaped by accumulated experience—memory, prior work, relationships, places, and earlier selves—carried like a “backpack.” The image suggests both resource and burden: the past supplies material and perspective, but it also weighs on the present. The quote highlights a central dynamic in autobiographical and spoken-word poetics: discovery happens in the act of making, yet the maker is never starting from zero.