Judith Tannenbaum

New Village Press will publish By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, a two-person memoir Spoon Jackson and I are writing together. We will talk about prison, poetry, education, inequity, beauty, possibility, and what it means to be human. The process of our conversations — in person at San Quentin, and in letters over the nineteen years since then — is one Spoon calls diving, and both conversation and diving give shape to By Heart. You can read more about Spoon who is currently at CSP-Sac serving Life without Possibility of Parole.

New Village Press also published Arlene Goldbard’s excellent New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development. And here’s another brand new New Village Press book I strongly recommend: Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines by William Cleveland.

Also, I have one more new book to recommend. Uncommon Community: One Congregation’s Work with Prisoners documents and discusses three prison programs begun by a Unitarian congregation in Texas. The work is interesting, the perspective broad and deep.

Teach the Free Man is a book of stories by someone who knows prison. Peter Nathaniel Malae doesn’t advertise time he has or hasn’t done, but his intimate and intricate knowledge of California prisons, and what it is to be locked up in them, speaks for itself. Most of the stories show us men in cells, visiting rooms, on the tier, on the yard at Avenal, Quentin, and CMC. A couple stories are of parolees; one is in the voice of a guard whose own son has been charged with murder.

Malae can write. He was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University this past year, he won the prestigious Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award for his first novel, and he was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lion Award in fiction this year. You can hear “Turning Point,” the book’s opening story, on KQED’s Writers’ Block.

Here are a few of the lines I noted:

“Prison is many things, after all, but mostly it is the gross simplification of life’s complexities.”

“No visits, no riots, no incidents. Only the clicks of the popping cell in trochaic monometer. Clink. Clank. Clink. Clank. Clink. Clank. Only unquestioned directives over the PA in the same. ‘Lockdown!’ ‘Med call!’”

“I rolled into the Unit Monday morning, absorbing the whole setup without even consciously trying, that’s what institutionalization does to you: You’ve always got your radars going, like an insect. There were little framed signs up, the kind you find in convalescent homes: ‘Footsteps in the Sand’ and ‘Chicken Soup (for Convicts).’ Bullshit to keep you from thinking about the loaded deck of the system.”

The book’s title is from Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” Here’s the stanza the words live in:

In the deserts of the heart
let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

I encourage anyone wanting to know more about prison and prison arts to read Richard Shelton’s Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer (The University of Arizona Press, 2007). Shelton is often referred to as the OG prison writing teacher, having done this work – while also a full time professor, poet and writer – since the early 1970s. At that time, Shelton received a letter from a man on death row asking if the professor would be willing to read and comment on some of his poems. One thing led to another, and Crossing the Yard tells the story of the journey.

Shelton is such an honest reporter. He tells us about his initial morbid curiosity when asked to “read the poetry of a monster” – an attitude he’s now ashamed of – and the desperation he felt when witnessing unexpected horrible consequences for some of his prisoner students as they became poets. He tells us about institutional stupidity and the subversion he found he had to use in order to get anything good done inside. Many of Shelton’s former prison students are now prize-winning writers: Jimmy Santiago Baca to Ken Lamberton (Ken has his own new book out, Time of Grace).

I love the life Shelton has made of his thirty years crossing the yard. And also I’m something like envious. From the beginning Shelton has visited students, written to them, had them over to dinner once they’ve been released; some have become nearly part of his family. I can no longer work in California prisons because I visit and write to my former San Quentin students. Also, almost all of these men are still inside (the three men I’m closest to serve their 30th year this year). I can only wish for sharing meals and movies, hikes and afternoons in bookstores – the sharing Shelton and his wife have made part of their lives.

Many of us doing this work debate about what verb to use for what we do. Are we teaching? Facilitating? Sharing? Shelton is clearly a fantastic teacher, willing to be very honest when responding to the men’s writing. He is also, with equal clarity, a human being sharing with other human beings. He doesn’t sing his own praises in his memoir, but the details he writes of – what he did and how he did it – inspire me to sing his praises.

Crossing the Yard closes at the end of a workshop in which nearly all the men report they’re going to be transferred, many of them to private prisons in other states, most of them to facilities where there will be no support for the good work they’re doing – transferred for no sensible reason at all. The last line of the book says better than I’ve ever heard said what my prison arts friends and colleagues say when we speak to each other of what we’ve experienced and witnessed: “I want to put my head down on the table in front of me and weep with a pain that will not be comforted and a rage I cannot express.”