To Keep a Green Branch from Snapping

Love is contraband in Hell,
cause love is an acid
that eats away bars.
—Assata Shakur

The editors of this issue read thousands of poems submitted by people who have experienced incarceration, which were winnowed down to the sampling here. We have been working collectively toward publication since 2017. The contributors, who are often no longer perceived as people in the non-incarcerated world, are indeed human. Many of them have partners, families, friends, and try to help other people. Some of them have made mistakes. Some have faced cycles of violence and abuse themselves. I hope that people come to this issue with open minds, and I’d like to underscore that openness by saying that poets are not members of  the jury. No one undertook this project to declare a verdict on any of the contributors therein. Although many of these poems are about the lived experiences of being contained—sometimes indefinitely—by the state, we discovered poems about subjects that some of us hadn’t considered. We read the words of poets from across the country and outside of it, from poets of different faiths, races, cultures, and abilities. None of these poems romanticized prison or glamorized aspects of how they ended up there. We were not looking for a poetic noire. We hope that we gathered some work that illustrates honesty and vulnerability. We considered a range of issues that the contributors wrote about, but each poem took on some compelling element that moved us as artists and writers editing this issue.

This brings me to a poem that kept resonating in that electric tissue of my mind. I found myself carrying around Nazim Hikmet’s poem “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison.” If you’ve never heard of Hikmet, he was a Turkish poet born in 1902 in Salonika, now Thessaloníki, Greece. I have always taught this poem in jails and prisons because it often becomes a lighthouse moment. A beacon of awareness swings into view for at least a few students because they realize that someone, imprisoned for a long time for his political beliefs, wrote poetry that speaks with a deceptive simplicity and captures their experiences. They find affirmation that their own experiences are worth writing about too.

The last time I taught this poem was in 2019 at Stateville prison, a men’s maximum security prison just outside of Chicago, where I’ve taught poetry workshops for almost three years. On that cold spring day in the small concrete square known as “the education building,” we read Hikmet’s poem. There were two moments that the poets reading and discussing it were completely fascinated with—when Hikmet says,

To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
                        is sweet but dangerous,

and when Hikmet advises, after a woman stops loving you, to do the following:

Don’t say it’s no big thing:
it’s like the snapping of a green branch
                                        to the man inside.

When it comes to the “sweet but dangerous” distractions that exist in such tenuous conditions, the people inside prisons know them and some do their best to dodge them altogether, but that “snapping of a green branch” caught each of the poets off guard. How dare Hikmet describe that kind of vulnerability where a branch can bend and nearly snap. How did he so simply describe an act that could lead to an irrevocable break where a person cannot return to what they were before?

On March 7, 2020, I unknowingly taught my last in-person poetry workshop at Stateville. The students were already murmuring about COVID-19 because they follow the news more closely than many people beyond such confines. I reassured them that I’d be back because I had no idea how fatal this pandemic would be, especially for Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color, who have suffered significantly throughout 2020 due to this unprecedented health disaster and the persistent racism that underpins police brutality. During 2020, and in the years to come, Poetry magazine will be dealing with its own legacy and challenges with race and privilege. As a guest editor, I couldn’t think of a better time to showcase the brilliance and challenging subjects presented by poets here, who represent so many marginalized communities. I corresponded with some of my students throughout the summer of 2020. At least two of them were diagnosed with COVID-19, and one at Stateville died from it.

As startling developments evolved and the National Guard set up a mobile hospital on the prison grounds, I heard more stories where prisons across the country turned deadly, and many people have protested for medical releases and pardons to help loved ones escape the infectious conditions of prisons and get home to hopefully safer family environments. When I’ve participated in readings and talks online, I’ve discussed these conditions because people are often curious about what happens in prisons, but this is also an opportunity to turn analytical and creative eyes toward how these institutions do not address human needs and rights.

As Americans, many people simply think about human rights as an issue in distant countries or as the fodder of strident poems. This issue of Poetry magazine challenges both of these notions. Most of these poems came out of America, where we are now thinking about which workers are essential. Haven’t poems declared everyone from all sorts of experiences essential and human? If not, they should. These poems consider the practices of freedom and the lack of it.

Many of the poems here address the “small freedoms” that Hikmet described. Those freedoms are allowed or taken away by people who are deeply involved with what we now call mass incarceration, the carceral state, or the prison industrial complex. When you read these poems and the essays by my coeditors Joshua Bennett and Sarah Ross, as well as contributors Roshad Meeks and Audrey Petty, and look closely at the stunning collection of visual art, think about the poets discussing Hikmet’s poem. Consider how they set their pens to paper to offer advice with thoughtful metaphors and tender line breaks. They can speak for themselves. Even if you visit a prison, you may never fully understand that lived experience, unless you’ve served time yourself.