Judith Tannenbaum

Reviewed by Diana Lion
Turning Wheel/Winter 2001

When I think about prison in this country, poetry is not the first word that leaps to mind. This despite the evocative images of their cold grayness, acid fluorescent lighting, and clanging entry gates. This despite the fact that incarcerated people have extraordinary stories to tell.

Working or volunteering in San Quentin offers many challenges. Many are difficult to articulate. Simply setting foot inside one of the 33 California prisons in the current hungry-ghost system forces us to confront the stereotypes lurking in our minds. Even for those with progressive leanings, our ideas of who convicts are, and how different they are from who we are, go deep, unexamined until we face them directly. Prisons are one of the clearest places we can examine our habitual patterns of making people into “the other,” into the sorts of people who cannot possibly feel the same feelings we do or share the same needs we have. We are all diminished by this separation.

There is also the challenge of seeing things clearly – of not allowing romantic notions to blur our interactions with prisoners, nor falling into deluded notions of what people inside have done to get there. Some, not all, have done things that would make us cringe. The reasons and situations are varied. This also goes into the mix.

Judith Tannenbaum has written a book about her years of teaching poetry in San Quentin that captures these and many other lawyers of the complexities that arise in relating with prisoners. Her situation was remarkable: She was paid through the Arts in Corrections program in San Quentin for three and a half years to teach poetry to groups of inmates, back with “the Q” was still solely a maximum-security prison. She was part of a community of people there – and throughout the prison system – who committed large portions of their time and hearts to working with inmates to encourage their creativity. Tannenbaum writes about the different and parallel processes she and the guys go through as they meet weekly to discuss, write, and read poems. Along the way she gains increasingly keen insight into the differences she at first may have wanted to gloss over in her eagerness to bridge the obvious gaps.

I particularly appreciated reading about the lawyers of what the author went through emotionally. It was the sort of reflecting I have done myself and gave me the impression that she was talking to me personally. I felt less lonely after reading it. “Long-term, in-depth” was the description of the program’s mandate as well as the quality of interaction Tannenbaum captures. Although she describes in crisp detail the prisoners in her classes, with the backdrop of indignities they must handle, she also empathizes with the difficulties of custody staff (guards) and administrators. She takes no easy ways out. She tells of walking the tiers (floors of cell housing) to distribute fliers one day, and the crippling exhaustion she felt after listening to a torrent of prisoners’ needs for four hours. She uses this experience to understand more fully the guards’ daily grind. She describes the heartbreak of introducing an intercommunity experiment: trading written poetry between elementary school students and her SQ class. The resulting connection shakes everyone’s heart open. But then the Community Resource Manager nixes the possibility of further contact (even with safety measures built in). Despite the disappointment, she struggles to see his perspective rather than dismiss it.

Tannenbaum’s most touching descriptions capture the breadth of her connections with the inmates. Her students publish several booklets of poetry, put on a full-scale production of Waiting for Godot, and plan a surprise party for her at a time when she is particularly tired. They also let her know powerfully when she crosses a line. When she reads them poems she’s written from the prisoners’ point of view, their outrage causes her a sleepless night spent examining whether she is exploiting those relationships for artistic gain, among other things. The author uses this, like every other experience she describes, as a clarifying lens for greater insight. And of course each Monday evening class eventually ends:

The moment always arrived – whether I was teaching alone or sharing the evening with a guest artist – when the officer would announce that count had cleared and class was over. We’d all gather our papers, walk upstairs, and shake hands. I, alone, would watch the men turn right on their way to the blocks. In that instant before turning left to walk out of the prison I felt, as more than one visitor put it, like a Cinderella: Coaches and ballgowns turned back into pumpkins and rags.

This “sensation of severance” was also described powerfully by Elmo Chattman, one of the men in the class, who writes:
For three hours in that basement room we are cut off A million miles away from your daughter and your cat A hundred yards from death row.

I loved this book, and heartily recommend it for those who have volunteered in prison or are curious about it.

Diana Lion, a longtime Vipassana practitioner, directs the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Prison Project