In Pursuit of the Practice of Freedom

Emancipation is given by the dominant, it being a legal, contractual, and social category. Freedom is taken and created. It exists as a right against the captor ... and is a practice shared in community by the subordinate captives.
—Joy James, “The New Abolitionists”

Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore

And there are stars, but none of you, to spare.
—June Jordan, “Sunflower Sonnet Number Two”

For those who are said to be and become nothing. Build nothing. Think nothing worth repeating or claiming as thought as such, the commonplace assertion that poetry makes nothing happen—largely attributed, it bears mentioning, to W.H. Auden, himself a poet held in high esteem by more than one shining star within the Black aesthetic tradition—simply doesn’t pass muster. Within various sectors of what Amiri Baraka and others have called “the black world,”  and, on a much smaller cosmological scale, what we might think of herein as a constellation of sites, subsurface and elsewhere, operating under the general heading of Black America, poetry makes everything happen.

Both inside and outside the classroom, countless Black children across the twentieth-century landscape grew up hearing all about Langston Hughes’s theories on dreaming: the consequences of both their deferral (the threat of explosion) and utter absence (the transformation of  life into a flightless bird). They knew his soul ran river-deep. They revised and reclaimed Paul Laurence Dunbar’s mask. They rehearsed Gwendolyn Brooks’s verses from the time they were old enough to speak. From the litany of personal testimonies you might hear soar from an uptown Pentecostal storefront Sunday morning, to the intricate pyramids of language built by girls playing hand games in the park, blue and yellow berets like starshine caught in their faultless braids, to the flock of teenagers ciphering over by the bodega, each impromptu sixteen-bar set turning everything within a half-mile radius into a stage, the message is clear. In this world behind the Veil, the literary arts are everywhere, and take on countless forms. Our children are poets. Our musicians are poets. Our organizers, activists, and community leaders have always been poets. In all its irreducible complexity, beauty, and terror, Black social life is a testament to not only the necessity, but the ubiquity, of poetry in the everyday lives of those barred from the protections and protocols of white civil society. All those forced to make a kind of life in the break, in a cell, underground.

It is with this larger literary, aesthetic, and political tradition in mind then, that I would like to frame this special issue dedicated to the work of incarcerated writers: that is, as one firmly dedicated in the first instance, to the abolition of interlocking systems of capture and control which seek to limit their life chances. Our aim herein is not merely to publish beautiful poems—though I am deeply grateful for the chance to have read the fine work that graces these pages—but to make a much larger claim about the role of the literary arts in an age of mass incarceration, and the work of prison abolition itself as intimately tied to a continuous, unflinching investment in the dissemination of incarcerated people’s writings, as well as the funding of arts education programming which might facilitate that praxis. Publishing, and working to continuously cultivate, the writing of incarcerated people the world over should be absolutely central to the mission of present-day literary institutions. As terms like “mass incarceration,” “prison reform,” and “the New Jim Crow” continue to gain prominence within the collective American consciousness, it is crucial that we meet that shift in language with renewed efforts in the material realm: doing our best to offer financial as well as other support to programs and practitioners already doing the good, necessary work of facilitating arts education on the inside. In keeping with that vision, this special issue is, in one sense, an argument about what literary arts institutions owe their audiences, and the writers and educators who make the work possible. In another, much deeper sense, it is about what the literary world owes to the incarcerated.

I speak in the language of debt and repair, captivity and abolition, here, because I believe that these are the true stakes of the matter at hand. When we talk about the material end, and material ends, of prison, we are necessarily also talking about the abolition of everyday carceral practices on the outside: carceral modes and motifs, carceral ways of speaking, teaching, and relating to one another. This demands, of course, a rigorous analysis of any number of standard institutional and interpersonal practices from the schoolyard to the home front: detention, suspension, expulsion, corporal punishment. Indeed, the tentacles of the prison state extend far past the brick and metal buildings that presently hold millions of this country’s most vulnerable. This is part and parcel of the reason we wanted to be sure that various community voices—the children, colleagues, collaborators, and friends of those affected by our nation’s singular commitment to keeping its people in cages—also had their voices reflected in the issue. The vision we seek to extend is one in which the prison is shown to be an ecological problem, one that damages not only individual lives but entire life-worlds, entire communities and landscapes and alternative forms of knowledge. The semiotic is a battleground. Our struggle against the prison state must also be waged at the level of the aesthetic, and it is my sense that the poetry produced by the world’s captive is an absolutely critical space in which to engage in that struggle.

As an editorial collective, we made a choice in this issue that goes against the grain of Poetry magazine’s long-standing practice of not publishing work that has been published elsewhere. This choice was made, in no small part, because we understood the process for this special issue of the magazine would require us to approach the practice of editing with different aims and instruments than we might normally. Given the unique circumstances under which this work has been published, we thought it made sense to name that practice explicitly, and gesture toward it as a choice rooted in an ethic of restoration and the redistribution of value. Indeed, it is our hope that this issue can operate in the first instance as a site of reparation, as well as an occasion to reimagine the literary arts as a space in which we respond to the most brutal facts of our present regime with the best of the human spirit.

Finally, I want to note here—along a somewhat divergent vector than I did in the beginning of this introductory essay—that this special issue is merely one nodal point on a much larger historical spectrum of literary collection and everyday activism in the abolitionist vein (and not only the abolition of prisons, of course, but the abolition of the police state, racial capitalism, and chattel slavery), a constellation of witnesses that includes but is not limited to June  Jordan,  Joy  James, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Tiyo Attallah Salah-El, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Jonathan Jackson, Little Rock Reed, Huey Newton, Assata Shakur, and countless others on both the outside and inside alike. This issue, at its best, is at least in part an attempt to bring this larger history to the fore. To lift the names of ancestors, as well as those of our millions of kinfolk currently held in the death grip of the carceral state. In no uncertain terms, this is ongoing, collective labor. It will require our most radical freedom dreams, and demand the creation of new language, new approaches, new visions for the symbolic order beyond the one we have inherited. We have gathered here in the name of that ceremony. To clarify where we have been, where we are, and gesture toward another vision of what we might yet become.