A Quote by Amitava Kumar

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

Amitava Kumar

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Common Confetti Conventions Immigrants Nostalgia Parades Platitudes Poetry Political

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Amitava Kumar
Indian - Writer
Born: March 17, 1963

Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry.

Gerald Stern

One of the biggest gaps in sports is the difference between the winning and losing teams of the Super Bowl. They don't invite the losing team to the White House. They don't have parades for them. They don't throw confetti on them.

John Madden

Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.

Margaret Thatcher

The greatest gap in sports is between the winner and the loser of the Super Bowl. The winner has confetti, parades, rings, the whole thing. The loser puts his head down and goes to his house.

John Madden

Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit.

Linda Hogan

But-! I say! The common conventions of humanity-' 'Are all very well for common people.

H. G. Wells

Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other-at least as much as love poetry-and cannot be forced because then it becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pan though all other poetry in order to become a political poet.

Pablo Neruda

I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose; it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes reading poetry seem more natural.

William Empson

My work is based upon contemporary Greek poetry - poetry which is concerned with the problems of today's civilization and, of course, with simple personal feelings of love, nostalgia, etc.

Mikis Theodorakis

My feeling is that most political poetry is preaching to the choir, and that the people who are going to make the political changes in our lives are not the people who read poetry, unfortunately. Poetry not specifically aimed at political revolution, though, is beneficial in moving people toward that kind of action, as well as other kinds of action. A good poem makes me want to be active on as many fronts as possible.

John Ashbery

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

Kenneth Koch

If the dominant political expression that we're seeing right now is of nostalgia and we know that nostalgia won't really work out, what happens is, we become depressed as individuals and societies - when we're depressed, we're much more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by demagogues and xenophobes.

Mohsin Hamid

We don't have parades for mathematicians, we have parades for astronauts. You don't think about all the thousands of people who worked on that capsule and crunched the numbers and were integral in getting that into space.

Theodore Melfi

You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions.

Lev Grossman

Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´

Don DeLillo

There's a sameness about American poetry that I don't think represents the whole people. It represents a poetry of the moment, a poetry of evasion, and I have problems with this. I believe poetry has always been political, long before poets had to deal with the page and white space . . . it's natural.

Yusef Komunyakaa

A Quote by Amitava Kumar

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