Shahid liked to call himself a triple exile—from Kashmir, from India, and from Urdu—but in fact his homeland was poetry. Which is to say: the whole world.
—Christopher Merrill, “Remembering Agha Shahid Ali”

At the start of my first one-on-one conference with Agha Shahid Ali, I slowly read my draft to him and then set the page between us on his office desk. After silently reviewing the page once more, Shahid looked up and asked, “What if you turned this poem around?”

And so I proceeded as he suggested, inverting the lines.

Reading my writing backward felt like abracadabra as the poem revealed something stranger, truer, more distilled in reverse. Language alchemized as the words loosened themselves from my intention. The poem became more of a poem.

Back then, I was a fledgling graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. Although I’d entered the MFA program as a self-declared fiction writer, eager to learn from John Edgar Wideman, I also wanted to study poetry in Amherst. Poetry was the form that had first set me flowing as a child, and Gwendolyn Brooks was the first poet I carefully studied. Alluring in their capacious imagination, empathy, and slyness, her poems granted me wisdom and alertness. Miss Brooks’s respect for children’s artistry convinced me that I could be a poet, too.

I’d soon go on to love Langston Hughes and William Wordsworth and Lucille Clifton. As a French major in college, I’d be assigned rounds of recitation to make the grade in my nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry classes. Some nights I walked from library to mailroom to dormitory, speaking in stanzas of a second language. I still know Alfred de Musset’s Tristesse from memory if I slow myself and close my eyes.

___

The trees were soon hushed in the resonance
of darkest emerald as we rushed by
on 322, the route which took us from
the dead center of Pennsylvania

(a stone marks it) to a suburb ten miles
from Philadelphia. “A hummingbird,”
I said, after a sharp turn, then pointed
to the wheel, still revolving in your hand.
—From A Nostalgist’s Map of America by Agha Shahid Ali

The first poem I submitted to Shahid’s workshop was inspired by his own exquisite collection, A Nostalgist’s Map of America. Daring in their explorations of displacement and exile, Shahid’s aching poetry kept me rapt and still. His poems were destabilizing. Shahid taught me new ways to look at the rain.

The poem I’d set in reverse during our conference was, in part, about relocation as loss and adventure—about how driving a great distance on a turnpike at night can make you feel like you’re neither at home nor away, especially with a beloved along for the ride. I revised and revised that poem until I wasn’t sure if it was threadbare or shining. Shahid offered a range of challenges and homework assignments when we conferenced again. And so I’d closely read poetry with the aim of simply noticing its limitlessness.

Of course, I persisted in trying my hand. I experimented with form and wrote in code about my own fresh and stupefying grief. Still I feared—I knew—that my poems risked nothing. When Shahid gently chided me about my prose logic, I took his admonishment to heart. Back then I felt embarrassed, being aptly summed up as a square fiction writer, hemmed in by a penchant for linear chronology. But now, eighteen years since Shahid’s passing, prose logic means something far more sweeping to me, and Shahid’s refrain resounds as an invitation.

In 2012 I joined the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project (P+NAP) in Illinois, a visual arts and humanities project that connects teaching artists and scholars to men who are incarcerated at Stateville maximum security prison through classes, workshops, and guest lectures. Most of my P+NAP students are condemned to what the state calls natural life, but what they call living death.¹

When I first began teaching in prison, I taught with syllabi I’d designed for college and university classrooms on the outside. Always, always, my students met this coursework with utmost seriousness and intellectual rigor. I’d leave every class with homework I’d need to do (reading, researching, puzzling) to try to keep up with them. While I taught memoir during my first few years with P+NAP, my most recent class was a reading and writing seminar, Mapping the Self in Community. I shared teaching duties with my sisters, both of them teachers and scholars, but I took the first leg of the course—eight weeks—and my assigned texts included poetry by Martín Espada, Willie Perdomo,² Natasha Trethewey, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, essays by Saidiya Hartman and James Baldwin, Spatializing Blackness by Rashad Shabazz, High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of Public Housing by Ben Austen, and music by B.B. King and Stevie Wonder. Our first day was dedicated to introductions and expectations.

In this workshop, we’ll read, view, listen to, and generate work about location and identity. Together we’ll experiment with writing exercises to engage and explore complex dynamics of community-making. You’ll be asked to read carefully, to share your interpretations in discussion, to write often, and—as a result of these activities—to formulate your own independent arguments in response to the works that we read together.

One paragraph into our review of the syllabus, Q. raised his hand.

“What if you don’t have a community?” he asked. “We’re all wearing masks here,” he said to everyone. Citing the decades he’d been incarcerated at Stateville, Q. added, “I’ve been up in here with most of y’all all this time, and don’t none of y’all know me.”

Class truly began then and there.

Students proceeded to respond, with a working definition of community as positive human connection, and while most agreed they’d been closed and guarded to keep themselves safe inside of prison, a good number of students also talked about ways they’d meaningfully made community with others. D. talked about becoming like brothers with a cellie who’d come up in a rival gang. He said they would have been “mortal enemies” on the outside. G. described the purpose and camaraderie he’d found on a new debate team.³ J. said that church meetings were a source of peace and fellowship for him. Several men attested that P+NAP itself was treasured community. And N. repeated something he’d mentioned to me in a previous workshop: how men like himself, who’d lived in the recently shuttered F house unit, devised elaborate sign language with their entire bodies to communicate across the vast expanses and constant noise of the Panopticon.⁴

We read aloud from our course packet that morning. First up were Martín Espada’s “En la Calle San Sebastian” and “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100” (written “for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center”). We read each poem aloud three times and talked at length about what we noticed.

N., who took a turn reading “En la Calle San Sebastian,” said it felt like a chant to him, and that the chant pulled him in and brought him closer to the dramatized drumming of the congas. R. remarked that the music was conjuration, making space for the living and the dead to gather on a street in Old San Juan. And J. talked about music inside of “Alabanza”—the radio was turned on in the restaurant’s kitchen “even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish/rose before the bread.” J. tracked the silenced music when the plane struck the North Tower, “after the thunder wilder than thunder.” We marveled at the worlds contained in “Alabanza”—how the speaker conferred blessings upon everything they surveyed.

And we rested with the final stanza of the poem, dwelling inside conversation between “two constellations of smoke.” A. noted music’s ultimate return. We couldn’t plumb definitions (What is elegy? What is praise song?) because the officer on duty walked in to say, “Time!” So I gathered my belongings and shook each student’s hand as goodbye. The next time we’d meet, we’d begin by following Espada’s poems as our prompt for our own poems. Think about your own communities past and present. What community will you invoke and sanctify? Make use of refrain in your verse. What do you want to insist upon?

What I didn’t communicate out loud that first morning was the fact that P+NAP was beloved community to me. How strange, how humbling it is to find and make community in a place that I believe should not exist. My aim is to support a most spacious, transgressive classroom, a site of mutual flourishing. My challenge is to keep learning how to do this.

We wrote together every class that winter, sometimes at the start, always at the end. In their company, I followed my instructions and kept my hand moving, searching myself. Invariably I looked up and glanced at my fellow writers, all traveling on their own pages. Returning, returned, we shared, continuing to introduce ourselves.

^{¹“Although Illinois successfully abolished the death penalty in 2011 after a decade-long moratorium on executions, students in our classes are still condemned to die in prison. They are among the nearly 206,000 people serving life or virtual life sentences in the United States, according to 2017 research from the national advocacy organization the Sentencing Project.” Alice Kim, Erica R. Meiners, Audrey Petty, Jill Petty, Beth E. Richie, and Sarah Ross, coeditors of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom.}

^{²P+NAP students’ Where I’m From poems were featured in a special literature edition of South Side Weekly. https://southsideweekly.com/where-im-from-pnap-lit-isse/. These poems were modeled after Willie Perdomo’s poem “Where I’m From.”}

^{³The Debate Club was cancelled by the Illinois Department of Corrections in April 2018 soon after they held a public debate on the topic of parole opportunities for prisoners with lengthy or life sentences in front of eighteen state legislators, IDOC officials, and members of the media.}

^{⁴“Imagine a wagon wheel lying on its side and missing all of its spokes. A giant guard tower sits at the hub and four stories encircle it with hundreds of cells. It housed around 400 men and not a moment of silence.” Joseph Dole, “Shutting down the Panopticon: A Report from Inside the Stateville Correctional Center,” Truthout, December 8, 2016.}