Gregory Boyle, Father Greg, quotes this line of Jack Gilbert's in Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. He also quotes Mark Torres: "We see in the homies what they don't see in themselves, until they do." One of the best descriptions of what I notice myself lately calling "the work." So grateful for Father Greg and for this book.

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.”

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

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.

Hartman has done twenty-nine years in five California prisons. The years Hartman writes of are the years in which I’ve known the California Department of Corrections (“Rehabilitation” has recently been added to the department’s title, but as nearly all programming is about to be cut beginning next year, there’s no rehabilitation happening other than what the men and women inside create for themselves).

I know what I know due to the various poetry workshops I’ve taught inside, as well as to researching and writing a manual for artists working in prison for the state’s Arts in Corrections program. Through teaching, interviewing staff, or sitting in visiting rooms, I’ve been in at least half of California’s thirty-three prisons. I’ve learned most from close friendships with former students – including a recent collaboration with Spoon Jackson on our book: By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives. Spoon, Coties, Elmo, Smokey and the others are all lifers and each has served Hartman’s twenty-nine years and more.

Hartman tells not only his personal story, but also the broader story of what’s happened in California prisons in the past three decades. Both narratives are compelling, well written, factual (and accurate to what I know and hear), and incredibly important. I’ve appreciated all three books out this fall, but in many ways, Hartman’s got to me most. Due to his own skill, I’m sure, but also because so much that he writes mirrors the experiences and expressions of the men inside whom I know best.

Hartman’s personal story is one that moves from adolescent evil to adult consciousness. The book’s publisher – writer and editor James Atlas – comments on the book’s first line, which he feels is impossible to forget: “When I was nineteen, I killed a man in a drunken, drugged-up, fistfight.” Hartman immediately lets the reader know: “Anyone who knew me could have seen it coming.” He’d been in trouble for years and had spent a long time in the juvenile justice system. He was state raised (thus “Mother California”) and ended up with a life without possibility of parole sentence.

Hartman shares some of the familial reasons that logically led to his becoming such an angry young man, but there’s no blame or self-pity in his writing. Mostly his narration is objective, almost that of a journalist, not denying emotion but maintaining steady sight, and at just the right distance to allow intimate vision and wider understanding. In this way we watch the young race-identified white man do all kinds of bad in his first years in prison. And we watch, too, his increasing consciousness and self-directed change.

Since “increasing consciousness and self-directed change” is the path I’ve watched my former students walk, I am deeply curious about what encourages such opening. In Hartman’s case, writing played a part, but mostly it was love – first from (and to) his wife (who saw and reflected the good that was in him) and eventually from (and to) his beloved daughter. Although our era keeps moving away from this knowledge, everyone I know who works with young people or people in prison knows this exact truth: deep growth comes through love and bright reflection, not through punishment and negativity.

Eventually Hartman works with others to establish what’s called the Honor Program at Lancaster (California State Prison – Los Angeles County). I know a group of prisoners at New Folsom (California State Prison – Sacramento) who are also old lifers, also sick of their part in perpetuating race hatred in prison, also sick of negativity instead of steady encouragement toward greater humanity. This group, too, brings men together to do deep work on their own spirits. I’ve learned so much about real – self-directed and group-supported – change from these men. I wish the wider voting public understood that this kind of work – prisoner-led – is going on all over the country. I welcome Hartman’s report.

As Spoon and I prepare for the April 2010 release of our book, I am so glad for these three other books. “Each man does his own time,” as the saying goes, and Betts, Masters, Hartman, and Spoon Jackson prove that point. Each man “came awake” inside, but each journey was unique and not programmable.

A Question of Freedom is getting lots of attention (from NPR to HipHopWired), and I’m very glad. Those of us on the outside – the ones making decisions about who we lock up – need every report on prison we can get from those who’ve been there. Betts’ report is that of a very young man – a teen-ager still (“Sixteen years hadn’t even done a good job on my voice,” is the book’s first sentence) – and therefore shines important light on this aspect of contemporary US incarceration practice.

What I appreciate most in A Question of Freedom are the ways Betts attempts to:

1. understand why he was drawn to the uncharacteristic moment that brought him to prison;

2. express the responsibility he feels, especially to his mom;

3. speak out about all the young black men in prison with him, while at the same time working hard for a complex – rather than a simplistic – analysis of this fact;

4. present the varieties of senselessness he encountered in prison;

5. describe the various ways he educated himself (with some, but not much, help from prison programs or staff);

6. claim how literature – reading and writing – shaped the man he became as he walked out of prison.

Betts is no longer a teen-ager, but he is still a very young man. A Question of Freedom is being marketed as the first work of an emerging author, and that description makes sense. The book has the virtue of rawness – conveying as it does the confusion and circuitous thinking experienced by a child locked up with adults – and some beautiful writing. Betts’ telling also bears the (probably inevitable) limitations of a young mind that has not yet developed enough scope or distance to create a coherent whole. No matter the “more” I wish from the book, A Question of Freedom is important and I’m very glad to see it building a large readership.

During this stay I finished work on By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, the two-person memoir I've been writing with former San Quentin student, Spoon Jackson. By Heart will come out April 2010.

On my next-to-last night, I read Spoon's first chapter in our book to the group. After I read the last word, the room was completely silent. I looked up from the page and saw each woman was crying. I went back to my cabin and tried to describe this amazing moment to Spoon in a letter to where he's housed at New Folsom. Each woman wrote him her own note about what his story -- and the beauty with which he wrote his story -- meant to her.

Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin and Teeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes: Writing Poetry in the Primary Grades came out at just about the same time, though the story of each was so different. It took me years to find how to write Disugised -- to discover what was, and wasn't, mine to tell -- and then a couple more years to sell what I wrote. Everything about the process was a (deep and good) challenge.

In the midst of that process, I was sharing poetry with little kids and their classroom teachers asked me to teach them how to do what I was doing. Then they asked me to write them a book. Then they told me to publish what I'd written. Then they told me which publisher to send it to. And then that publisher took it. Everything about the birth of Wiggly was fun and relatively easy (the path created for me ).

The books came out at almost the same time, as I say, and as I didn't know how to find an audience for Wiggly, I relied on the wonderful Stenhouse Publishers to do it for me. With Disguised, once again, I worked hard, throwing myself into finding the readers I thought might be there -- setting up readings, interviews, lectures, etc. With Disguised, too, I lucked out with my publisher: Northeastern University Press was fantastic. Although the staff was so small and I had to do a lot of the work, they were right there with material support in every way they could be.

The two books -- one taking little from me but love, and the other taking just about all I had to give -- have sold about the same number of copies (very mid-list). I've gotten lots of nice response to Wiggly, but I often joke that -- although Disguised has sold only a few thousand copies -- I've heard from just about every reader. Partly, I think, this is because Northeastern is (was -- the university shut down the press a few years ago) a university press and the bulk of the book's readers have been college students who want me to know what the book has meant in their lives. Also, there is a small world (a niche, I guess such worlds are called these days) actively involved in prison arts and prison issues, and we tend to find each other and to be grateful for each new experession of what it is we do and see and work toward.

I don't know exactly what I think of these "niches." I love the community of prison artists and activists I feel so close to. At the same time, I'm pretty sure Disguised tells a story more people than those in this niche would find of interest. As a reader, I love when the new book of an author I already love is released. But I also love being surprised, finding a book by an author or on a subject not already close to my heart. Current directions in publishing and book distribution seem to encourage finding one's niche, and to discourage being surprised by the unexpected. I suppose, as with most things, there's something gained and something lost.