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.

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, –

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.

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.