Prison Poetry

Harold Segel’s The Walls Behind the Curtain: East European Prison Literature, 1945-1990 shows the ingenuity of poets and writers in responding to circumstance and lack. For some poets, prison forced them back to the origins of poetry, back to oral composition:

“When writing tools are forbidden, this process has to regress all the way back to the stage when literature was spoken rather than written; and for many, this ‘regression’ is little short of revelatory. ‘Until then I had never thought that it was possible to make a poem without pen and paper, but apparently they did not belong to the essence of poetry, not even to the ceremony of poem making,’ says György Faludy, who spent three years in the Recsk labour camp in Hungary. Alexander Solzhenitsyn could not have agreed more. Segel lists other East European authors who come to rediscover the origins of the Western poetic tradition in twentieth-century prisons, reconnecting with poetry as an art of memory, where rhythm and rhyme are above all mnemonic devices. The Albanian poet Visar Zhiti got out of prison with almost a hundred unwritten poems saved in his mind.”