Judith Tannenbaum

Human Beings Together

My work life has been in the field of community arts. I’ve shared poetry with little kids in primary schools, with teenagers in continuation high schools, with retirees in community college classes, and with adult men and women in prison. In September 2000, my book Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin came out, and its existence allowed me to talk to many people about poetry, about my prisoner students, and about this unusual field in which I’ve worked for 30 years. The question I was most often asked as I read from my book in bookstores, and as I was interviewed in newspapers and on radio, was: “How did your students change?”

Of course, I understood what the questioners meant. My students were maximum-security prisoners, most of whom had been convicted of serious crimes. Many had harmed , even killed , another human being. Poetry, on the other hand, is a force for the good. Surely, these questioners seemed to assume, the purpose of sharing poetry in a place like San Quentin is to transform men from criminals into productive citizens. Please, these questioners seemed to hope, let us know good can transform bad.

I understood, but the question surprised me. As the question was repeated in interview after interview, in one post-reading question-and-answer period after another, I found myself quite astonished. For whether working with children, elders, gifted teenagers, or prisoners, I’ve never thought my job was to change anyone.

Instead, I’ve thought my task was to meet my students; to pay attention to their interests and ideas; to share poems I love, tools of poetics, and the work of as wide a range of poets as possible; to encourage everyone to explore his or her own voice and vision; and to create ways to put the resulting poems out in the world. I’ve thought of my work as demanding (as sweetly as possible) that the outside world listen. For the youngsters, struggling teenagers, and prisoners I’ve worked with are most often unheard, most often excluded. As Coties Perry, one of my San Quentin students, put the matter in one of his poems:

Say how ya doing Outside world? Do you remember me?
I’m that intricate part
Missing from the whole
The one y’all decided to forget….

San Quentin was a maximum-security male prison during the four years I taught there in the late 1980s. Most of my students were serving some kind of life sentence, most had come to prison in their early twenties and had been down about 10 years when I met them. What I felt, and continue to feel, is that almost everything about prison is designed to be “that hatred like hands in the way it touched me at times,” as Elmo Chattman, another San Quentin student, put it.

San Quentin poet Spoon Jackson described the hatred this way, in his poem “No Beauty in Cell Bars”:

Restless, unable to sleep
Keys, bars, guns being racked
Year after year
Endless echoes of steel kissing steel.

For a moment, think of the worst thing you’ve ever done. Whatever it is, remember it well. Now imagine that this act is all you’re known for. Imagine that everything in your world is designed to treat you as a person defined by that act. Any other fact of your life-any act of love, kindness, compassion, intelligence, creativity, joy, humor-is irrelevant. You are only a person who has done this worst thing. That’s it, that’s you, from now till forever.

This is the reality of a person in prison. Whether you actually did that worst thing, or you didn’t; whether it was one uncharacteristic act or part of a sad series of missteps; whether you are still the person who committed that wrong or someone whose spirit has grown - you’ve been convicted and you’re thrown into a world where all you are is bad and ready to do bad.

In such an environment, I was given a grant that allowed me to share poetry. I had a room in which my students could be not only prisoners but also poets. We-the men and I-were given hours each week in which we could greet each other with a brighter range of emotions than “hatred like hands,” could listen to sounds richer than those echoes of “steel kissing steel.”

I, and the guest artists I brought in, related to the prisoner poets as full human beings and not as men who were capable only of one worst act. I did what I could to provide a space in which other qualities-those qualities of compassion, intelligence, and joy mentioned above-had room to live and grow. I worked with a core group of men over the four years I taught at San Quentin, which means I got to know my students pretty well and they got to know me. We knew each other-as much as prison rules and realities allowed-as people.

In such an environment, “change” isn’t the point. I wasn’t-didn’t want to be-a criminologist, therapist, social worker, or priest. I wasn’t even a teacher, exactly, though I certainly shared information and resources. I wasn’t trying to judge or analyze or, even, create poets. I wasn’t looking for what was “wrong” with my students. I wasn’t trying to change anyone.

I was-or I hope I was-a person sharing with other people. To intend to change someone requires an assumption that you know more than he does. I knew more about poetry than most of my students, and they knew more about living with regret. We all knew something about keeping one’s spirit alive in the midst of darkness. We each had strengths and weaknesses, we each had done good things and bad things. We were human beings, and for a few hours each week, we were human beings together.

Normal prison conditions are the consequence of economic, social, and political values and decisions. At the core is the tendency to divide the world into us and them and then to treat them as less than human, as different from us. There are not many situations in prison where everyone in the room-prisoners, cops, secretaries, or poets-is simply us, human beings together. I wanted our class to be one such situation.

In our years working together, one student who had known nothing about poetry when he entered our class began publishing his poems in many journals; another read a poem to his mother on the radio that had a listener call in crying for his own son. Public school students read the prisoners’ poems and were inspired to write poems of their own. The San Quentin poets created a book, The Real Rap: A Message to the Youth, that we distributed to over 400 schools, juvenile facilities, and community programs.

After I’d worked at the prison for a few months, Elmo Chattman handed me a poem he said was the first he wrote after coming to prison:

METAMORPHOSIS
Hostility
like a garden
GROWS
rising up
out of the grave in my heart
where I’ve buried the man
I used to be.

Elmo describes the metamorphosis prison most naturally creates, encouraging those locked up to become something closer to the monsters they’re perceived as being. Classes like mine provided a different kind of encouragement: a space, a few moments, in which hearts could be something other than graves, a space in which hearts-my students’ and mine- could instead be nourished by poems, by conversation, by human sharing, by love.