"I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry"
About this Quote
Nothing lands louder than Cage claiming he has "nothing to say" while staging the act of saying it. The line is a tidy paradox with a dare behind it: if you’re waiting for art to deliver a message, you’ve already missed the point. Cage isn’t confessing emptiness; he’s rejecting the idea that meaning is the artist’s cargo and the audience is the dock.
The subtext is anti-authoritarian in the most polite way possible. By declaring his contentlessness, Cage strips the composer of the priestly role of interpreter and moral guide. What’s left is attention itself: the frame, the duration, the choice to listen. It’s the same move he makes in 4'33", where the "piece" is the room and the audience’s restlessness becomes the score. "I am saying it" matters as much as "nothing": the action replaces the statement, and intention shifts from expressing an inner self to arranging conditions where the world can intrude.
Context does the rest. Mid-century modernism was obsessed with breaking inherited forms; Cage did it by breaking the ego. Influenced by Zen and chance operations, he treated control as the real illusion and noise as the real truth. The wit is that he smuggles a manifesto inside a refusal to write manifestos. Poetry, here, isn’t elevated language; it’s the moment language admits its limits and still insists on being heard.
The subtext is anti-authoritarian in the most polite way possible. By declaring his contentlessness, Cage strips the composer of the priestly role of interpreter and moral guide. What’s left is attention itself: the frame, the duration, the choice to listen. It’s the same move he makes in 4'33", where the "piece" is the room and the audience’s restlessness becomes the score. "I am saying it" matters as much as "nothing": the action replaces the statement, and intention shifts from expressing an inner self to arranging conditions where the world can intrude.
Context does the rest. Mid-century modernism was obsessed with breaking inherited forms; Cage did it by breaking the ego. Influenced by Zen and chance operations, he treated control as the real illusion and noise as the real truth. The wit is that he smuggles a manifesto inside a refusal to write manifestos. Poetry, here, isn’t elevated language; it’s the moment language admits its limits and still insists on being heard.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Silence: Lectures and Writings (John Cage, 1961)
Evidence: I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it. (Lecture on Nothing (page number varies by edition; commonly cited around pp. 109–126)). Primary-source location: the line occurs in John Cage’s text “Lecture on Nothing,” which appears in his collection Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan University Press, 1961). The version widely circulated online (“I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry”) is a shortened/modernized punctuation variant; Cage’s printed line is commonly given with the added clause “as I need it.” Multiple secondary discussions note the lecture was delivered at an artists’ club in New York in 1949, but the earliest clearly verifiable publication I could substantiate via web-accessible sources is its appearance in Silence (1961). Some references also state the lecture text was printed in the journal Incontri Musicali (Aug. 1959), which would predate the 1961 book; however, I did not locate a directly accessible scan/page image from that 1959 primary publication to quote from it verbatim here. If you need the *first publication*, the best lead to verify next is Incontri Musicali (August 1959) printing of “Lecture on Nothing.” ([on-air.caricomassimo.org](https://on-air.caricomassimo.org/en/airchive/lecture-on-nothing?utm_source=openai)) Other candidates (1) John Cage As-- (Sam Richards, 1996) compilation95.0% ... Cage says " I have nothing to say , I am saying it , and that is poetry " we have to accept that ' nothing ' is n... |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Cage, John. (2026, February 7). I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-nothing-to-say-i-am-saying-it-and-that-is-92500/
Chicago Style
Cage, John. "I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry." FixQuotes. February 7, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-nothing-to-say-i-am-saying-it-and-that-is-92500/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry." FixQuotes, 7 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-nothing-to-say-i-am-saying-it-and-that-is-92500/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2026.
More Quotes by John
Add to List
