‘I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.’

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.” Wisława Szymborska slipped this into “Possibilities,” from her 1986 collection The People on the Bridge. She had been a Communist Party member until 1966 and signed a 1953 petition endorsing a Stalinist show trial of the Kraków Curia that handed down death sentences. She later renounced that work, refused to let it be reprinted, and wrote for the Polish underground press through the 1980s. She took the Nobel in 1996 with all of it public.