A Quote by Charles Bukowski

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

Charles Bukowski

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Else Happens Nothing Poetry Poetry Is

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Charles Bukowski
American - Novelist
August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

A. E. Housman

What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.

Sam Hamill

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.

Gertrude Stein

Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.

Christopher Hitchens

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.

C.D. Wright

I love poetry. It's at the heart of everything I do. Poetry transforms what we call language, and uses language as the stuff to become something else. I get spun around by what happens in words. When that occurs, it inspires images that seem so original to me as an artist, even though I'm following what the poem has offered.

Ashley Bryan

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

John Berger

A plate of food hits the table, lands right in front of you. One of two things happens. Either you sit up and look at it and react to it, or nothing happens. If nothing happens then that restaurant is stuck in mediocrity forever.

Jon Taffer

I will say this: it's important to work hard, but you have to know your limits. There's always another show, but if there's no "you"; if you have nothing left to give, nothing else happens. It all disappears.

Jenn Wasner

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

Christopher Koch

Nothing happens to you that has not happened to someone else.

William Feather

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

Matthew Arnold

Art is a tyrant. It demands heart, brain, soul, body. The entireness of the votary. Nothing less will win its highest favor. I wed art. It is my husband, my world, my life dream, the air I breathe. I know nothing else, feel nothing else, think nothing else.

Rosa Bonheur

Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there's going to be a plunge. I think poetry is dangerous. There's nothing mild and predictable about poetry.

Josephine Jacobsen

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

Claudia Rankine

A Quote by Charles Bukowski

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