Poetry Is Prismatic

I’ve taught poetry in jails since 2006. Today I’m in Denver, but I’ve also taught in Indiana and Illinois, and a little bit in Washington. It is work, physically, intellectually, and emotionally, and I have never been paid for it. I started because people I love are in the system and the system will outlive me. If I had the cash to pay everyone’s bail and the power to abolish prisons entirely, as Mariame Kaba says we must, I would. Since I don’t, I show up with poems. I listen. Like Joe Brainard said, quite seriously: “I think it’s always nice to know that you are not alone. Even in death.”

Poems are not money, but I talk about money because the US prison industrial complex (which is allowed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which continues to legalize slavery) works in money-language. Money-language requires fixed points and impermeable boundaries, which is not really how bodies and poetry work. I think it is violent when people reduce poetry to pretty or therapeutic (of course it can be, but limiting it that way is like calling a child stupid for trusting a good feeling). Poetry is prismatic, a tool for connection and distraction and growth, and so bringing it into a system that runs on numbers is a radical practice. This is not a naïve stance.

My work is rooted in Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire’s radical hegemony, the shock and the not-shock of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur seeing their own faces on wanted posters on the subway, and the fact that poems are not a first month’s rent and deposit, sandwiches, detox, or therapy. (“Look at very small things with your eyes,” writes Bernadette Mayer in her poem “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica,” “& stay warm.” It’s a process.) My work is rooted in the way I felt listening to songs through headphones as a teenager. When you listen, you know the sound is separate from your body because it vibrates it. And if something feels better afterward, or clearer or lusher or even just temporarily palliated, even just different, you could begin to trust that the outside world might bring good. It might hold you sensibly, sometimes. And then, you can hold it. At its core, this is what poetry can do in prisons—it can give us all some tools to plan and build the equitable world we already know we need, and it can resist stasis and capital as the only path to that beloved community. One of my favorite poems for thinking about time and language is Fatimah Asghar’s “Pluto Shits on the Universe”: “Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.”

I do have inked wrists and I had an undercut, but I’m also a cis white person with a doctorate, so it’s relatively easy for me to code-switch through metal detectors and infinite paperwork. This is privilege, not deception. While I have absolutely walked through the gates with iffy money for the rest of the month, I can afford a feast of dollar-store pens three times a year, I generally have access to a copier, and because I’ve been doing this so long, weekly prep time is whatever I have for it. (The writers choose their own weekly themes, but generally we cycle around five or six, in particular “love,” “addiction,” and “parenthood.” We often read Rachel McKibbens’s untitled poem on last love: “Let this wild depression throw me beneath its hooves/if it brings me to you. Let me pronounce my hoarded joy/if it brings me to you.”) Most significantly, because I never ask the system to pay my rent or transportation, I am never angry that it doesn’t. And when I can’t, or when I need a rest like any professional, it’s OK to miss a week or two. The work continues to build, and each week’s packet has extra poems for the rest of the time.

In my classrooms inside, we have two rules. One: this is a place to write. You can use whatever languages feel natural, and whatever languages you want. Or you can draw pictures or write notes, but you must be here to write, and you must not prevent anyone else from writing. This focuses us, and it invites writers to advocate for the languages they choose while also offering a platform when that language hurts. It also lets us talk about spelling and grammar as a way to make meaning and pattern: to show history. Quite consciously, we use words like “normal,” “time,” and “worth”—words usually just said to or at you when you’re in jail. We read the section in Roald Dahl’s The BFG  where the BFG dreams about his book:

IN ALL THE CITIES PEEPLE IS WALKING IN THE STREETS BUMPING INTO EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEIR FACES IS BURIED IN MY BOOK AND DENTISTS IS READING IT AND TRYING TO FILL TEETHS AT THE SAME TIME.

Or, more immediately, Gwendolyn Brooks: “We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

Two: we assume that your writing is not autobiographical unless you say it is. This is important because it eliminates both violent pity and manic reporting. Of course, everyone writes from personal experience somehow, but in a community context it is more empowering when people create their own boundaries, because then they can shift them too. This, I think, is the closest poetry comes to therapy, but it is still different because consent is constantly being given, and time can tendril. For example, one writer made three years of poems about an abusive husband, and one day she said that this husband was in fact real, and hers. She said she always knew how much he hurt, internally, but our reactions made her realize that he really was hurting her too. This wasn’t a dramatic moment, but it allowed us to start conversations about local shelters and other imperfect resources for a parolee.

This is the through line: this is how your poems (the ones you read and the ones you write) teach you to occupy space in your own life. This is how we talk about ghosts, and valentines, and rap instead of only ever time and money. “friend,” writes Danez Smith, “you are the war’s gentle consequence.” In jail, this too is currency, and it matters.

Image and text from the author’s Instagram: “jail at my back/we finished with franny choi’s ‘the world keeps ending, and the world goes on’ but first——tonight’s theme was FLOWERS so we read floriography & julian talamantez brolaski’s rose is arrows is eros & the part in h.d.’s eurydice where ‘hell must open like a red rose/for the dead to pass’; omg”