Jill McDonough, who has been teaching in Massachusetts’ prisons through Boston University’s Prison Education Program, has a fantastic blog. She’s currently writing about each class session, sharing the poem up for discussion and her students’ responses. She also has a great blog roll that includes some fantastic prison-related photography.
R. Dwayne Betts – “a good student from a lower-middle-class family” – carjacked a man, went to prison, and has written a book about the experience. Betts was sixteen when he committed the crime, but tried and convicted as an adult; he served eight years in Virginia prisons. He’s been out for four years now and in that time has earned a BA, founded a book club for young men (YoungMenRead), been an intern at The Atlantic, married and become a father. Betts is now a graduate student at Warren Wilson College. His book of poetry – Shahid Reads His Own Palm – won the Beatrice Hawley Award and will be out from Alice James Books in May 2010.
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.
Just home from residency at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island overlooking Puget Sound. Six women writers are each given a cabin to live and work in, as well as meals. Applications for February through November 2010 must be postmarked by September 24, 2009.
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.
Belle Yang asked the above question on Red Room, and I posted a poem and a story in response.
The poem is by Angel Boyar (who was my student at San Quentin in the 1980s), and the second a story about poet Frank Bidart, who came to San Quentin as a guest artist.
WHAT IS A POEM?
I am a poem
The world is a poem
The butterfly is a poem
Nothing is a poem
God is a poem
This poem is a poem
Speaking in tongues is a poem
A rock is a poem
Shit is a poem
And the corn in it too
Is a Poem.
Food is a poem
I eat poems
I write poems
I talk poems
I see poems
I drown poems in more poems
Water is a poem
Crying is a poem
Joy is a poem
A poem is what is a poem
I am speaking in poems
Don’t ask what is a poem
Just read the goddamn poem
And leave it alone
A poem is invisible!
This section about Bidart’s visit is taken from my Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin. Bidart had agreed to visit my class, but a lockdown meant there was no class that night. Instead we got permission to visit one of my students — Elmo Chattman — who was doing time in the hole. Witnessing the conversation between these two men remains one of the big gifts in my life.
As Bidart and I walked down the long tier to Elmo’s cell–both of us decked out in those camouflage-green vests–we were surrounded by the sound of a baseball game blaring from what seemed like every TV in the block. For the next hour or so, Elmo and Bidart stood on either side of the bars talking of poems while noise filled the cavern around them: “Strike three!” then “He’s out!” followed by both raucous cheering and booing.
I watched the two men search for some body equivalent of the handshake the bars and heavy screening rendered impossible. This was the moment I most often placed my open palm on the screening as a gesture of touch through so much layered steel. But Elmo and Bidart, who were after all strangers, instead leaned toward each other very slightly in greeting.
Elmo seemed to recognize that he was the host, and he welcomed Bidart to East Block with the dignity of a man receiving a guest to his home, though it happened to be humble. My heart filled with sensation watching Elmo’s ability to be precisely who he was, precisely where he was, without either apology or self-righteousness. I was equally moved by Bidart, this gentle-seeming man standing within East Block’s prison-at-its-roughest essence. I had no idea, of course, what his mind was noting or his body registering, but to all appearances Bidart was calm, meeting Elmo as a man and a poet. The two men began to discuss the process of transcribing what one hears in one’s head to the page, and I backed away to give them some degree of privacy.
The same steadiness I now observed in Bidart had impressed me at his reading in Berkeley earlier that week. There, too, the man had stood against gray concrete, for UC Berkeley’s Architecture Building nearly matched East Block for cold, stark presence.
In Berkeley, Bidart had talked between poems about what it was to grow up in the Bakersfield of the late 40’s and early 50’s when you were a boy who knew yourself as gay, when you were a boy who loved opera and refinement. Bidart was talking of difference, of sensing oneself as an Other, but that Berkeley audience kept encouraging Bidart to take easy jabs at Bakersfield’s lack of cool.
That audience laughed, praising itself, as I grew angrier and angrier at what, to me, seemed arrogant privilege. Bidart resisted irony. He did not deny the difficulty of growing up different, but he refused to pander to the crowd.
Here in East Block, I watched a similar honesty. Although grunts and whoops surrounded Elmo and Bidart as they talked of poems and the writing of poems, nothing in Bidart’s stance indicated disdain for the men all around us. He just quietly–with beauty and attention–continued to talk to Elmo.
Suddenly a huge roar enveloped East Block and when it died down, Bidart asked what it was like to write in the midst of such noise. Elmo spoke of staying up half the night to write and to read during the hours the block was nearly still. Bidart said he, too, often needed to withdraw from the world, to disconnect his phone, to stay inside solitude, in order to write.
Elmo passed his copy of “The War of Vaslav Nijinksy” through the open food port and asked Bidart to read. Bidart turned his body so that enough light might fall on the page, and then began:
Suffering has made me what I am –
I must not regret; or judge; or
struggle to escape it
Bidart continued. Then there was a break in the ballgame and, for a few moments, silence swelled, surrounding Bidart’s pauses. Another onrush of cheering filled the block before Bidart went on:
There is a MORAL HERE
about how LONG you must live with
the consequences of a SHORT action, –
Richard Shelton — whose excellent Crossing the Yard I praised in a blog post a couple weeks ago — is featured tonight on The Jim Lehrer NewsHour along with his prison workshop. A decent first look at what this work is; some fine poetry and interviews with the prison poets; and Richard speaks so wisely, beautifully, and from his heart.
You can watch the segment on the NewsHour site. And check out Walking Rain Review, visible on the desks in the NewsHour segment.
In his poem “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison” — a poem I love and recite just about every time I give a reading or talk — Nazim Hikmet says it’s possible to pass many years in prison “as long as the jewel on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster.” Let me begin this new blog, on my updated site, with this very short post that honors that jewel, the heart we all share.
