Judith Tannenbaum

by Bell Gale Chevigny
The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. XVII, No. 12, September 2000

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.
(p. 29)

So, almost casually, Coties, a student in Judith Tannenbaum’s poetry workshop at San Quentin prison, drops his challenge. In Disguised as a Poem, Tannenbaum collaborates with Coties to remind the world of the existence of prisoners in the US, ever more forgettable as their numbers – two million and counting – become more unimaginable. No faceless abstraction, Coties insists on his intricacy. And like Coties, Tannenbaum writes to make us see that our completeness depends on owning the part we put out of sight.

Deceptively small, this beautifully written and timely work layers many books into one. A witness to the prison experience, a quest for wholeness of vision, it is also a testament to the power of poetry and a memoir of a brave and original woman.

A poet whose students have ranged from young children and gifted teen-agers to high-risk youth and prisoners, Tannenbaum is currently a training coordinator for WritersCorps, which places writers in community settings to teach creative writing to youth in need. She was shaped – and briefly broken – by Berkeley in the 1960s. Hospitalized for an emotional crisis at seventeen, she was misdiagnosed by a doctor who had barely talked to her. The experience put her forever on the “side of anyone at the mercy of the Powers That Be.”

Healed by falling in love, marrying, bearing a daughter and going “back to the land,” after fifteen years she came to find her security stifling. Changing scenes and lovers solved nothing. “Wherever I moved, the pain was still there, so I finally stopped moving. Then this settling, occasioned by enormous distress, became something like peaceful, became that going deeper I’d been urged toward in leaving my marriage, became touching the earth.” One winter, “steady rain, my hurting heart, and the solitude of a small cabin whose windows looked out on thick stands of fir forced a quiet and stillness that allowed me to sink to the depths of the poems that I loved.” Poems memorized and recited in this state became “a strong enough vessel for passage through pain.”

Tannenbaum was impelled not only to sound her personal depths but also to engage the world’s contradictions. Moving back to the Bay Area with her daughter in 1985 she began teaching in San Quentin, the maximum security prison that squats on the northern edge of breathtaking San Francisco Bay. Again poetry was her talisman. She worked for Arts-in-Corrections, a program that sends qualified art instructors into prisons. In 1981 California’s legislature voted to supplement funding for programs in visual, literary and dramatic arts in six of the then dozen state prisons.

At that same time California took a sharp turn toward punitiveness. With the prison guards’ union becoming the state’s most powerful union, the passage of initiatives like three-strikes-and-you’re-out, and the increasing denial of parole, the state’s prison population has quadrupled since 1980 and the prison industrial complex has become a central prop of the state’s economy. Miraculously, Arts-in-Corrections has kept pace with this mushrooming growth and now offers programs in all 33 state prisons. Touring recently with Doing Time, my anthology of prisoners’ writing, I observed remarkably effective AIC programs in two facilities and met Tannenbaum and her former AIC boss, artist and facilitator Jim Carlson. They deepened my persuasion that California lies at the heart of the nation’s contradiction on corrections, harboring both our worst and our best practices.

“The test of a first rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Tacking the quote above her desk, Tannenbaum found many applications for it – first in Carlson’s counsel: “To survive and do a good job working in prison, you have to hold onto what it is you want to do and, at the very same time, let go of all assumptions that you’re going to get it done in the way you first planned.” To reduce the contradiction, Carlson treated San Quentin’s staff and inmates with equal respect, trying always to create a “win-win” situation.”

Another application of Fitzgerald’s test flowed from working with men many of whom were murderers, although she came to admire and care for them, she never forgot this fact. Tannenbaum was banking on the power of poetry to draw her students, as it had her, through painful self-searching to some measure of self-trust – and even trust and care for others. In that spirit, she gave them “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison,” by the Turkish political prisoner Nazim Hikmet, who wrote that long sentences can be tolerated “as long as the jewel/in the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster.”

When Tannenbaum sought her students’ response to Hikmet’s poems, Elmo, a politically astute African American balked, “You sail in here with your hippie ways,” he said, “wanting us to open up… you have to earn closeness from us.” But the next week he described his emotional lockdown: “Hostility/like a garden/grows/rising up/where I’ve buried the man/I used to be.” The declaration itself, of course, was an opening. Poetry became a battleground for warring forces in Elmo’s awakening heart and finally a container in which to offer the whole self. The students come, he writes:
bearing the fruits and scars of our embattled lives disguised as poems scrawled on bits of paper…

After three hours “wrestling with words,” in “a place called poetry,” Tannenbaum or one of her guests manage to get close to me only to be peeled away like the bark from a young tree leaving behind a little spot bare and vulnerable that does not want to see you go but will die of exposure long before you return. (p. 201-202)

After a year of weekly classes, winning a residency grant to teach twenty hours a week for three more years enabled Tannenbaum to build a caring community on that vulnerability. Spoon, an African American from the Mohave Desert, had seemed a harder case – sitting silent for months, barricaded by a ring of empty chairs, eyes masked by sunglasses. He finally broke silence with a lyrical voice that bespoke an enduring innocence. In “No Beauty in Cell Bars,” he laments “Endless echoes of steel kissing steel/Noise/Constant yelling/Nothing said… Tomorrow’s a dream/Yesterday’s a memory/Both a passing of a cloud.” When Tannenbaum showed his work to a class of rural schoolchildren, they wrote enthusiastic responses. Reading them, Spoon wrote, “they went to my heart/no detours.” He was stirred to remove his shades: “I walked around smiling inside and out/I truly felt like a poet.” When correspondence was prohibited, Spoon took up his shades and his mask, but not his silence. Writing a poem, “Right now I choose sadness,” he taught Tannenbaum how to handle her own crises.

Crises were abundant. While thrilling, the inmate production of Waiting for Godot, directed by a Swedish director and his huge, often self-important, entourage, swamped AIC for months and even endangered the program. Frequent lockdowns canceled classes or forced Tannenbaum to teach cell-to-cell. Her students often challenged her attempts to follow the “no undue familiarity” rule. Her supervisor pointed out that being “a woman in a male institution… a free person in a world of animosity” she’d never understand, presented dangers beyond her imagining. “(S)ome incident could occur out on the yard and it could be related to you, though you’d done nothing to feed it,” he went on. “(S)omeone could get killed.”

No one got killed, but one of her seemingly gentlest students took her invitation to trust and love literally and, as he proved to have a record as a stalker, had to be transferred to another prison. Humanity had “suffered a blow,” Tannenbaum felt, reluctant to acknowledge that at times “caring is most properly expressed by severing contact.”
In its concern for the problems and conflicts as well as the extraordinary rewards of teaching in prison, Disguised as a Poem should be invaluable to people considering this adventure. As a nuts-and-bolts manual for such readers, I also highly recommend Words Over Walls: Starting a Writing Workshop in Prison by Hettie Jones and Janine Pommy Vega, veteran teachers and publishers of prison writers, published in 1999 by PEN American Center. (It is available from the PEN Prison Writing Program, 568 Broadway, Suite 301, New York, NY 10012 for $3.00.)

Though beginning and ending as a partisan of her students, Tannenbaum sought wholeness of social vision, resisting the oppositions – convict and cop, administration and teacher, black and white – that demarcated the prison. She aspired to see all sides while remaining passionate. Her appreciation for multiple points of view gave rise to a cycle of poems in the voices of guards (“I know how I’m thought of/as some kind of Nazi/a man who takes pleasure/in control over others”), prisoners (“I’ve got life without possibility of parole/Life without/Life without helping my kids do their homework,/without taking my mother to church”) and the mother of a raped child (“I still want to tell her/Baby, that’s not what sex is./Sex is good, you’ll see”). Tannenbaum’s appetite for connection made her a gifted listener, and this remarkable memoir richly displays the typical and exotic idiom of staff and guards as well as prisoners. Her sensitivity to the myriad and shifting perceptions and feelings of these groups and to her own responses begins to shake the foundations of many kinds of walls.