Judith Tannenbaum

Been reading and loving Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. Simic's prose poems inspired these collages.

Republicans in the House, along with many state governors and legislators, are focused on destroying public education, workers’ rights, community arts programs, a woman’s right to choose, public broadcasting, and affordable access to health care. Instead they are handing this country over to the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

I write to ask you to work as hard as you can to stand up to these forces. Please vote for what supports the education, work place, health care, and creative and information needs of the vast majority of us and against what undermines those needs.

Went with Aracely (WritersCorps teaching artist), Annie (amazing artist and long-time WritersCorps student), and my 20-year old nephew, Gus. We spent an hour or so talking (some of us ranting) after watching the movie. Here's some of what we said:

1. Yep, Guggenheim knows how to make a movie;
2. The children who provide the basic story line of the movie are wonderful, as are their parents;
3. The movie is already getting such a conversation going and that’s a good thing. And also a dangerous thing because Guggenheim misrepresents so much;
4. He does say that only 20% of charter schools get better results than public schools (“better results” means test scores), but that line is in passing while the story arc of the movie (as Gail Collins put it in her piece in NY Times) makes charter schools seem like the answer to the problem;
5. The movie basically says money isn’t the problem, but doesn’t mention the huge amount of money the charter schools he features have been given (by Gates, Broad, etc etc);
6. The movie talks a lot about the negative consequences of public schools as large bureaucracies beholden -- as institutions in a democracy are -- to diverse participants, but doesn’t raise any negative consequences of the “corporate” approach of many charter schools and being beholden to funder, etc;
7. Doesn’t show kids whose parents can’t or don’t advocate for them, immigrant parents who don't speak English, parents working three jobs, etc. Uses language of equity, but doesn’t exhibit awareness of what equity means in any real, on-the-ground sense;
8. Nothing at all about the value of public institutions in a democracy, or about why due process might be important and why we might not want teachers' jobs not to be at whim of each random supervisor or group of politicians or parents or anyone with a particular axe to grind. Nothing about what negative consequences of attaching teacher pay to student test scores might be;
9. A teacher in one of the charter schools featured wrote a wonderful blog about, right, this is WHY we’re so good. Nothing in the movie remotely about “what it takes”;
10. Geoffrey Canada and Harlem Children’s Zone are featured prominently, but there’s very little description of the entire program, only the school. The entire program of course began by saturating one square block with every single service residents needed, then moving out and out and out until a larger part of the community was covered. Mentioned but in such a way as if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t get it that even their middle school is one education venue in a whole line, beginning with Baby College for pregnant women and their partners. What HCZ is doing is way beyond the school. As many are saying about this:  "Well, at least we now know what real change costs!"
11. Every time Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, is on screen she's accompanied by devil dramatic music playing. The music alone makes her come across as a monster;
12. Unions are definitely the Bad Guy in the movie, but there's no mention for example, that in the states where students have highest test scores, the teachers' unions are strong, as they are in the countries lauded as successful (Finland, Japan);
13. Basically no teachers speak in the movie, give their sense of the problems and what they’ve seen work in their classrooms, schools, and communities;
14. Michelle Rhee is presented as a hero and there’s nothing in the movie about her actions that led to Fenty being voted out (which of course happened after the movie). Nothing about how, as DC has gentrified, the children taking tests there are not the same children who took them a few years ago;
15. We talked of those we know teaching in charter schools who tell us about the high percentage of children "counseled out." The movie said nothing about this;
16. The movie states that things have gotten worse in schools in the past decade, but doesn't make the connection that these are the years No Child Left Behind -- and emphasis on test scores -- has reigned;
    
17. The movie uses words like “working” or “success” without definition. Seems like the measure is improved test scores. There were many things our group discussed about this — including:

• The audience reacts so warmly to the children whose stories are being told because these children are bright, curious, articulate, adorable, etc NOT because they answer questions right or do anything related to testing. We love them because of their natures and how they express themselves.
• When asked why they want to get into the “better” school they’re entering the lotteries for, these children speak of having a better life, getting out of their neighborhoods. Their comments recognize that the problems are shared ones — economic, social — and because those problems aren’t being addressed, they want a way out.
• One of the boys, when asked how he feels about the boarding school charter school his grandma is trying to get him into, says his feelings are “bittersweet.” He wants to have the best chance for himself, but he doesn’t want to leave his family and friends.
• In her op/ed piece linked to above, Gail Collins writes that her own narrow wrath arose at the lottery system shown — how it’s made a piece of performance art and how children are made to feel that this one moment will make or break them. Of course the quality of school one attends is major, but our little group talked about how we want children to feel confident in making the best of even bad outcomes.
• We spoke about the movie’s assumptions (as Obama and Duncan also say) that the point of education is future jobs so that the USA can remain #1. We wondered if we really want our children to give up childhood (play, individual exploration, unstructured time to be curious, etc) for capitalist intentions.
  

I love Father Greg Boyle’s book. I love the stories he tells us, the sounds of his voice and those of the homies he shares his life with, and especially the book’s drenched-in-love, grow-your-heart’ness. I think most readers will feel as I do. (Amazon sales and reviews confirm this supposition. See for yourself.)

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.”

Spoon Jackson's book of poems -- Longer Ago -- is now available on lulu.com
Here's one of my favorite of Spoon's poems.

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.

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.

"Your vocation is that place where your deep gladness meets the world's great hunger." Frederick Buechner

Beginning to set up readings for By Heart. Of course, Spoon -- 32 years down on a life without possibility of parole sentence -- can't join me to read in person, but Michel Wenzer is making a film of Spoon reading from one of his chapters that I'll show. The schedule so far:

Thursday April 8, 2010 7 PM Diesel, a Bookstore 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, CA

Sunday April 11, 2010 4 PM Booksmith 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA

Wednesday April 14, 2010  7:30 PM Tattered Cover Book Store 1628 16th Street, Denver, CO

Wednesday August 4, 2010 6 PM Sacramento Poetry Center @ Central Library 828 I Street, Sacramento, CA

That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row is Jarvis Jay Masters’ second book, and it comes with endorsements by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Van Jones, author David Sheff, and many others. Although Masters writes of the crimes he’s committed, as well as those he’s innocent of though convicted – and although he writes some about his life on San Quentin’s Death Row – That Bird focuses primarily on Masters’ childhood and coming of age.

Much of what Masters reports is heart breaking: being left to watch over young siblings with no food to feed them, beatings and cruelty of foster care families, being set up to fight for bets by older male relatives, choices he makes against his own best interest. But Masters also describes the love he shared with his sisters, his wonderful first foster parents, the neighbor who silently left food for the children each morning, his caring though drugged mother. When life gave him a chance, Masters was the little boy he was born to be: loving, sweet, curious, responsible.

The story Masters shapes for the first two-thirds of the book lets the reader in very close as the child tries to make sense of his experience, as he learns to protect himself from hurt, and eventually, as he comes to feel most comfortable in institutions. Masters’ telling is honest, well written, deeply (humanly) interesting.

The last third or so of the book is also interesting, honest, and well written, but to me feels tacked on – more like a handful of essays than the continuation of an unfolding story. Perhaps the publisher felt the book needed to include stories from prison itself.

Both Masters and his publisher (HarperOne) seem to want the book to speak out most strongly about the foster care system. An important goal that Masters achieves. But I think the book does even more than this. That Bird shows one life – its huge difficulties and its few gifts – and how a being is shaped by both.

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.