Poetry:

…Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me..

Pablo Neruda (trans. Alastair Reid)

'Poetry is a plough, turning up time so that its deep layers, its black earth appears on top.'

Osip Mandelstam

'Poetry requires no special talent but rather a kind of spiritual daring, an unbinding that is also an unwinding.'

Octavio Paz

'It was the poets who continued to illuminate for me the places no one else seemed to want to talk about or visit.'

Janet Frame

'Poetry's not window-cleaning/ it breaks the glass.'

Chase Twichell