Judith Tannenbaum

I love Father Greg Boyle’s book. I love the stories he tells us, the sounds of his voice and those of the homies he shares his life with, and especially the book’s drenched-in-love, grow-your-heart’ness. I think most readers will feel as I do. (Amazon sales and reviews confirm this supposition. See for yourself.)

How something – ironic, painful, what-do-you-expect? – that Tattoos on the Heart came into the world at about the same moment that Homeboy Industries (one of the book’s primary subject) ran into huge financial difficulties. You can read more about Homeboy Industries (and make a donation) here.

Father Greg loves the community he lives in (the neighborhood around Dolores Mission Church in East Los Angeles) and he shares his love for each person he tells us about, even those who frustrate him no end. He writes: “You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”

“Evidence-based outcomes” is the name of the game these days – in Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan’s, Race to the Top and in the way most funders of programs working with youth or in prison demand evaluation. WritersCorps teachers know well how I roll my eyes or rant at all this. So it does my heart special good to read Father Greg’s chapter titled “Success.” He writes: “If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.”  Instead (as Father Greg quotes Mark Torres S.J.) “We see in the homies what they don’t see in themselves, until they do.”

Thanks to Robert Pollie for the time, thought, and heart he put into the By Heart program he assembled and aired on KUSP on April 25. You can listen here. Robert taped Spoon ten or twelve times — via collect calls from prison, with beeps and recorded messages. I love hearing Spoon speak for himself. On all the other radio shows so far, I’ve spoken for both of us — though most have played at least part of Michel Wenzer’s audio tape of Spoon reading from By Heart). Most responses and reviews of our book mention the two-person nature of our narration. Robert’s show gives the same feel.

Just home from Michigan. What a great art show! So glad to witness the PCAP Associates speak Saturday morning, and to join Phyllis Kornfeld (Cellblock Visions), Joe Lea (York Correctional Center in CT), Leslie Neil (ArtSpring in Florida), Deborah Tabola (Poetic Justice in San Luis Obispo), and Aylaina Verdejo, Lionel Stewar and Philip Sample for the afternoon panel.

First By Heart readings, too! At U Mich on Sunday, at Women’s Huron on Monday afternoon, and at Parnall on Monday evening.

Spoon Jackson’s book of poems – Longer Ago — is now available on lulu.com
Here’s one of my favorite of Spoon’s poems.

DARKENED ROOM

I sit in a darkened room
to hide
from nothing in particular.

I sit in a darkened room
to think
about nothing in particular.

I knock one devil on his ass,
ten more appear.

The angels, they want to stay
in the heavens, safe among the stars,
the lights of dusty immortality.

The devils swoop like hawks,
they swarm around the head
like summer flies.

I sit in bare-footed silence
chiseled in-between the two,
trying to keep symmetry.

Jill McDonough, who has been teaching in Massachusetts’ prisons through Boston University’s Prison Education Program, has a fantastic blog. She’s currently writing about each class session, sharing the poem up for discussion and her students’ responses. She also has a great blog roll that includes some fantastic prison-related photography.