Books » Disguised as a Poem
My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin
On the last night of their poetry writing class at San Quentin prison, one of the students commented to Judith, “Now I’m going to give you an assignment: write about these past four years from your point of view; tell your story; let us know what you learned.” Disguised as a Poem is Judith’s fulfillment of that assignment.This memoir details the challenges, rewards, and paradoxes of teaching poetry in a maximum-security prison. The San Quentin poets – Angel, Coties, Elmo, Gabriel, Glenn, Richard, Spoon – emerge not as beasts or heroes but as human beings with expressive voices, thoughts, and feelings.Tannenbaum also relates such events as visits to her group by prominent poets (including Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz); a prison production of Waiting for Godot sponsored by Samuel Beckett himself; and the presentation of her students’ work to a class of sixth graders and eighth graders, who connected to the prisoners’ words by writing their own poems to the inmates.Disguised as a Poem was a finalist in the Creative Nonfiction category of PEN Center USA West’s 2001 Literary Award Winners.