The Aesthetics of Silence: Prison, Rehabilitation, and Poetry

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Anthony Anaxagorou’s poem “Once I Had an Acceptance Speech” appears in the May 2019 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

The Guardian recently published a letter from Dr. Clare Coggins in response to an interview in which author Valeria Luiselli remarked, “if you’re going to devote your life to something as questionably useful as literature or art, I think there’s a commitment that you make to understanding others,”—the point of contention being the regard of literature as “questionably useful.” Coggins rebuked the claim, stating, “I am a doctor; I work in a hospice. I am painfully aware that science keeps us alive. But what keeps us living is art. The overstretched, underfunded NHS still finances an art therapist and a music therapist at my hospice. When patients need something to keep them going, they look to the arts.”

For the past five years I’ve worked in various male prisons across the UK. I’ve sat around tables with men convicted of drug offenses, fraud, and theft. I’ve discussed meter and assonance with those convicted of murder, rape, and pedophilia. During the initial months I found myself confronted with a moral dilemma. Why do men who have hurt, maimed, and ruined the lives of innocent people deserve my time? I wondered if being allowed the amenity to develop your writing should be seen as a privilege, not something readily available in a prison.

My first workshop was in 2013. Once security checks were completed, myself and the prison librarian made our way inside where I was immediately struck by the searing pungency, the indiscernible clangs ricocheting off steel doors, and the atmosphere fraught with tension and order. It was a space so densely populated yet constantly made to appear barren.

Bruce Springsteen has a lyric in “Dry Lightning”: “you get so sick of the fighting/you lose your fear of the end.” As the years progressed, and my work in prisons increased, the line kept returning to me. It wasn’t that I’d become inured; rather, I had cultivated a perspective. Most inmates were victims before they were perpetrators, or so the reformist maxim goes. England and Wales have the highest prison population in the whole of Europe, with statistics showing that for every 100,000 people, 179 are incarcerated. Sociologists show direct correlations between crime, poverty, PTSD, a lack of education, and exclusion from school. Public opinion on the matter is further distorted by mainstream media’s fetishization of criminals. Rarely seen in their totality, the general consensus is that they need to be punished, stripped of all autonomy, and left in a 6’ x 8’ cell, irrespective of the varying degrees of crime.

And yet some of the most compelling discussions I’ve ever had have been with prisoners. Equipped with a comprehensive grasp of British criminal law, their experiences are multivalent and complex. When we sit to write poems, a large proportion tend to have low or below average literacy skills, and they struggle to recall grammatical categories, with their reference point for poetry leaning more often toward music. I introduce myself, who I am, and where I’m from. First, they view me with suspicion, but once the North London working-class inflection is detected, their faces soften. Life-writing is conducive here in its ability to debunk the elitism and hegemony which still blemishes poetry’s public persona. It works to validate the stories and sensibilities of men who are stripped of anything resembling an identity. In 2018, self-harming incidents in UK prisons were recorded at 52,814, marking a record high and a 23% increase from the previous year. These men live each day defined purely by their transgressions, their shortcomings, or manias. My job is not to judge, that is for somebody else; my job is to provide them with ways to think and write about their lives in the hope it offers both reflection and restoration.

The poems they make are not necessarily concerned with form, nuance, or inventiveness. More than anything, they are about making a subject wholly visible. When each day in your life is being diminished, the last thing you want is to obscure meaning; after all, your very existence is predicated on erasure. We discuss technique alongside things such as using more interesting phrasing. Yet in prison I’ve found metaphor in particular is a device many prisoners consciously avoid, opting instead for a more translucent declaration, one which borders a stark confession: where the wistful poet, nestled under volumes of Lowell and Auden, might deploy a scar or wound as metaphor, these men may lift up their shirts to reveal several knife lacerations. Like this, the physics of metaphor ask to be renegotiated.

I’ve read poems urbane and curious, which have stayed with me. The title for this essay was in fact appropriated from a slam I judged at Pentonville Prison. The poet, an unassuming sixty-seven-year-old man, read “The Aesthetics of Silence.” He’d been exiled from China in the early nineties for his political writing, and whatever had happened since had resulted in him being imprisoned. The poem riffed on solitude and otherworldliness, in a gaudy and controlled vernacular. Other men write in more hackneyed modes about the events which landed them in jail. Some center their frustrations on the system, while others speak to God, to their former selves, to their loved ones, to the dead.

By the time I leave I’ve learnt their names and the places they grew up. Prison life is dangerous and lonely. In a hard house of rigmarole, art becomes the final frontier where the mind is free to travel beyond detention and reproach, to reckon truly with itself. Poetry is a utility offering transcendence. Lucille Clifton famously declared, “poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language,” and as Dr. Coggins suggests, it’s a place we return to when all other avenues close. Many of these men will be released back into the general population. The skills and apparatus we help establish before release and onward will play a vital role in the likelihood of them reoffending. These are people who society denied, who have in turn injured others and devastated lives. I like to believe that granting opportunities as precepts in favor of the betterment of people will, in the long run, advantage us all.