writers in prison committee report - PEN Canada

ison is essentially
shortage of space
ade up for by the surplus
f time; to an inmate, both
re palpable ... Prison is indeed a
ranslation of your metaphysics,
thics, sense of history, etc. into the
ompact terms of your daily deportment.
The most effective place for that is of course
olitary, with its reduction of the entire human
niverse to a concrete rectangle permanently lit by
he sixty-watt luminary of its bulb under which you revolve
n pursuit of your sanity ... On the whole, poets fare better in
olitary confinement than do fiction writers, because their dependence
n professional tools is marginal: one’s recurrent back-and-forth movements
nder that electric luminary by themselves force the lyric’s eventual comeback no matter what.
urthermore, a lyric is essentially plotless and, unlike the case against you, evolves according to the immanent logic of linguistic harmony.
Josef brodsky