Mike Kaulbars

“So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“By formally addressing itself to the infinite without the infinite receding into a definitionless void, poetry establishes a conceptual interface between the two terms. It creates the possibility of encounter with the unknown and the other by demonstrating this interface as essential to, and indeed constitutive of, individual human being.”
― Johanna Skibsrud, The Nothing That Is: Essays on Art, Literature and Being

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov