I write for my own contentment

Besides, I would have thought that the same thing applied to singing as has been said about poetry here in Iceland: 'I write for my own contentment and not my own aggrandizement'.

Halldor Laxness, The Fish Can Sing (Vintage Books, 2014) p. 238

Language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed

By means of poetic language, waves of newness flow over the surface of being. And language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed. Through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression, it opens up.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 222

Poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom

The poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging. This, no doubt, is emerging at short range. But these acts of emergence are repeated; poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents on the intense life of language.

Thus, along with considerations on the life of words, as it appears in the evolution of language across the centuries, the poetic image, assa a mathematician would say, presents us with a sort of differential of this evolution. A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language. It awakens images that had been effaced, at the same time that it confirms the unforeseeable nature of speec. And if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship of freedom? What delight the poetic imagination takes in making game of censors! Time was when the poetic arts codified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry, however, has introduced fredom in the very body of the language. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. xxiii

Build and dwell

The human being cannot build and dwell, that is to say, possess a dwelling in which he lives, without also possessing something more (or less) than himself: his relation to the possible and the imaginary.

Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) p. 82

Stories and legends that haunt the urban space

Totalitarianism attacks what it quite correctly calls superstitions: supererogatory semantic overlays that insert themselves "over and above" and "in excess", and annex to a past or poetic realm a part of the land the promoters of technical rationalities and financial profitabilities had reserved for themselves.

Ultimately, since proper names are already "local authorities" or "superstitions," they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) marks the city a "suspended symbolic order". The habitable city is thereby annulled.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 106

Language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away

Speech is this turning. Speech is the place of dispersion, disarranging and disarranging itself, dispersing and dispersing itself beyond all measure. For the speech that sets into flight, preserves in this very flight the movement of stealing away that is not content with desperate or even panic flight, and thus retains the power of stealing away from it.
[...]
Naturally, when this speech becomes petrified in a watchword, "flight" simply ends and everything returns to order. But flight can also, even while maintaining itself as an infinite power of dispersal, recapture in itself this more essential movement of stealing and turning away that originates in speech as detour. This detour is equally irreducible to affirmation and to negation, to question and to response; it precedes all these modes, speaking before them and as though in turning away from all speech. Even if it tends to determine itself as a power to say no, particularly in the movements that manifest themselves in revolt, this no that challenges all constituted power also challenges the power to say no, designating it as what is not founded in a power, as irreducible to any power and, by virtue of this, unfounded. Language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away – it watches over it, preserves it, loses itself there and confirms itself there. In this we sense why the essential speech of detour, the "poetry" in the turn of writing, is also a speech wherein time turns, saying time as a turning, the turning that sometimes turns in a visible manner into revolution.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 23

The world comes into existence as a world of language

Language has an infinite potency, but the exercise of language happens in finite conditions of history and existence. Thanks to the establishment of a limit, the world comes into existence as a world of language. Grammar, logic, and ethics are based on the institution of a limit. But infinity remains unmeasurable.

Poetry is the reopening of the indefinite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 158

Insurrection is a refrain

Insurrection is a refrain helping to withdraw the psychic energies of society from the standardized rhythm of compulsory competition-consumerism, and helping to create an autonomous collective sphere. Poetry is the language of the movement as it tries do deploy a new refrain.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 151

Poetry is language's excess

In order to accelerate the circulation of value, meaning is reduced to information, and techno-linguistic devices act as the communicative matrix. The matrix takes the place of the mother in the process of generating language.

But language and information do not overlap, and language cannot be resolved in exchangeability. In Ferdinand de Saussure's parlance, we may say that the infinity of the parole exceeds the recombinant logic of the langue, such that language can escape the matrix and reinvent a social sphere of singular vibrations intermingling and projecting a new space for sharing, producing, and living.

Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity.

Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 147

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semiotic debt. Deixis acts against the reduction of language to indexicalization and abstract individuation, and the voice acts against the recombinant desensualization of language.
Poetic language is the occupation of the space of communication by words which escape the order of exchangeability: the road of excess, says William Blake, leads to the palace of wisdom. And wisdom is the space of singularity, bodily signification, the creation of sensuous meaning.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 22