A Quote by Roberto Bolano

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

Roberto Bolano

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Always Been Neighbors Poetry Prison

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Roberto Bolano
Chilean - Novelist
April 28, 1953 - July 15, 2003

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

Ben Okri

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

Edward Hirsch

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

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

Evelyn Waugh

It's not as if I've ever been to prison or been close to going to prison. The closest I've got is knowing people who have been in jail - after all, I was a member of Parliament - and visiting them there during their sentence.

Michael Portillo

But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.

W. S. Merwin

As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office.

Conrad Aiken

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

Mark Strand

I began to write poetry when I was about four years old. In other words, I've always been writing poetry.

Ernesto Cardenal

Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

When I was in prison, I read an article - don't be shocked when I say I was in prison. You're still in prison. That's what America means: prison.

Malcolm X

I'm saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral & written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation & would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.

Jerome Rothenberg

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

I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It's always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it's found its way back. And it's simply an ingredient.

Billy Collins

You can be locked away in prison and be free if your mind is not a prison. Or you can be walking around with lots of credit cards and be in a prison, the prison of your own mind, the prison of your illusions.

Frederick Lenz

All of us have not been to a natural prison, but everybody in here has had a spiritual prison.

T. D. Jakes

A Quote by Roberto Bolano

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