The group that worked on this blog site is in the process of developing what we need (mission statement, etc) to create an actual Prison Arts Coalition entity. We hope to find funding that will allow in-person gatherings as well as other ways to share the work we’re all doing. We’ll post whatever we come up with on the blog site.

The book’s available for purchase and some of its information is available online.

“‘Art Teacher’ didn’t seem the right job description after a few weeks of working behind bars. Some of the men and women had already created strikingly fresh work without benefit of an art program or decent materials.

“Teaching the conventional principals, techniques, and subject matter—in other words, what was taught to me—not only seemed irrelevant, but that such an approach was likely to put a lid on the intense yearning to create what was obvious, and poignant, in most of the people who came to my classes.”

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, –

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.

Spent yesterday afternoon writing poems with a group of men at New Folsom – aka California State Prison: Sacramento. The Arts in Corrections room at this prison is small and stifling, but filled with paintings, books, musical instruments, and men doing serious work to make the next steps on their journey more in line with their hearts and souls than previous steps may have been.

When we walked out of the prison after class, Jim Carlson (who puts the arts program together at New Folsom) wondered again, perhaps for the hundredth time in the 23 years we’ve worked together, why people in prison are the absolute best students. Most everyone who teaches in prison notes that while students in high school, and often in college, might or might not pay attention and be involved, students in prison are always engaged, willing to try the exercise, and bring their whole selves to discussions and making art. I’ve done a lot of prison-arts teaching, and I’ve heard over and over from others doing similar work that prison students are the best group of students ever. Jim was asking, again: Why? Is it that there’s so little else positive to do? Is it because doing time is in fact doing time, and time slows down in a way that allows one to focus? Is it because the prisoners who choose to come to art classes have already self-selected? We contemplated this reason and that, but underlying all the reasons is this: the men in the arts room are human beings who have struggled with the wrong done in their lives (wrong done to them as children, wrong done by them as adults) and now want to explore what “right” might be in their lives.

Yesterday afternoon, after two hours of writing, I brought out cardboard, construction paper, glue sticks, and images from magazines. I showed the men Kenneth Patchen’s picture poems and we spent an hour making some of our own. At one point I looked up to see 15 men absorbed in cutting-and-pasting. These big guys, men half-the-world seems afraid of, looked like the 5 year olds they once were. Play was the mood in the room, fun — and the intense concentration inherent in fun. I asked if any of them remembered playing like this when they were little, and except for one who went to a church group once-a-week, they all said no.

Which reminded me of another time I was at New Folsom and Rick said, “If anyone had ever asked me to put my feelings on paper when I was a kid, who knows how my life might have turned out?”

Having spent my work life sharing poetry with kids and with prisoners – and working now primarily with youth in San Francisco – the path (an intentional one as far as I’m concerned) between some of our kids and prison is obvious. (The path between other of our kids and power is equally obvious.) I don’t think we can even talk about prison without talking about our children.

You can watch the segment on the NewsHour site. And check out Walking Rain Review, visible on the desks in the NewsHour segment.

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.

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.

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.”