A Quote by Nelson Mandela
Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality-thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.
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That's why I call the Senate the graveyard of democracy, because even when you have 58 senators, they can block it and block it and block it.
Democracy is not a fragile flower; still it needs cultivating.
We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.
I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
When a man lies he murders some part of the world
These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives
All this i cannot bear to witness any longer
Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home.
But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.
It was the combination of many factors... With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.
The sensuality of desperate lives. Only poets talk like that. But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does it bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.
Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
The grape Hyacinth is the favorite spring flower of my garden - but no! I though a minute ago the Scilla was! and what place has the Violet? the Flower de Luce? I cannot decide, but this I know - it is some blue flower.
If you and I have not seen God, we cannot bear witness to God.
One of the things called forth by the Imagist movement in poetry was neatness; and when we say keenness, we mean neatness. A knife that is keen is also a knife that cuts neatly; it isn't brutal. Sharpness is different from brutality. Brutality is clumsy: it is wide - it has a lot of fist and thumb and no delicate finger.
In fact, the same difficulties faced by Reagan in the 1980-s are still there [in the beginning of 21 century]: how do you hit a bullet with a bullet? The technology is getting better, but it still is focused on one interceptor knocking down one missile. In war, there would be many more challenges, more chaos, more uncertainty.
Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.
I'm coming from journalism, but at the same time I'm tempted by poetry, politics, and maybe the idea of being a witness, a belief that you can still change things with the image.
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
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