Life
is different on the other side of the electric gates, fences, dogs, and
concertina wire. Time passes like thick syrup; a pervasive sameness pervades
the days; and the yards are crowded. There are many more men than the writing
workshops can accommodate, and, sometimes, the number of men who show up make
them unwieldy and chaotic. We don't have the chairs, tables, materials, or time
to hear from everyone. Men get frustrated. They walk out.
I can't claim to know anything beyond the vaguest notions of what life is like
outside the workshops on the yards and in the cells. I am not subject to
dehumanizing treatment, the brutality, abuse, rape, or politics of predation
and power. But I do see that there are more poor, more black/brown/red, more
illiterate, and more mentally ill men in prison than I see in random scenes in
Tucson. Prison seems a kind of holding bin for both the criminal and the
outcast. And the numbers, by my count, are excessive.
If we counted up all of the people currently under "correctional
supervision" in the United States and made them a city, they would be the
second largest city in the country. In other words there are more than six
million inhabitants in our prison system. We are the world leader in locking
people up. Of the people we lock up, too many are non-violent, poor, black, and
addicted.
Prisons are also big business. More and more are privately run organizations
with powerful lobbyists who buy state politicians. We are "bankrupting our
states and creating a vast underclass of prisoners who will never be equipped
for productive lives," according to Fareed Zacharia.
The cost for this underground society is one we pay for by cutting education
and other social programs. Funding for schools goes down while funding for
prisons goes up. Already poor schools in tough neighborhoods get less. More
students fall behind and find ways other than school to get recognition, worth,
community. Crimes, gangs, homelessness, addiction add up to a cycle that digs
deeper into an already underground existence.
These men and women serve as fodder for a hungry prison business that needs
more and more people to sustain growth and keep investors happy. We exploit
misery.
In spite of this, most of the men I encounter are bright and want to learn. They
come to the workshops a little sheepish until they find their footing, their
voices, and some trust in the truth of their experience. Many in the hopeless
and stagnant world that prison can be find 12-step programs, some form of
spirituality, or reading and writing. The thread they hang onto is so thin and
subtle as to be all but invisible.
It is a thread many of them follow in the dark, the subterranean darkness that
is out of sight, hidden in shadow, as dangerous as it out of mind.
These are some of the
men and moments of the prison writing workshops at the Arizona State Prison
Complex – Tucson.
Heathco
I wait for the bus
after I pass through the sally port of the Main Gate at the prison. The day is
a prickly one -- heat pressing down and squeezing sweat out my arms, face, and
back. A stream of it runs down my back under my shirt.
But these days are lovely in a way. Curtains of rain obscure the Santa Rita
mountains to the south, and the hope of rain, of cool, fresh rain hums in the
heat. I hear thunder, see ragged sticks of lightning in the distance.
I don't mind standing out in the sun when the vista is like this.
Even the concrete beneath my feet glistens with humidity. Patient wildflowers
have defied the scraped discipline of the prison and sprung up in the lower
washes. The puddles left over from last night's storm hold blue sky and reddish
sediment.
A bus passes, but is not the one that will take me to Santa Rita. I wave at the
driver and he nods. I would have taken his bus, but that unit is locked down.
Another staff assault coupled with a staffing shortage keeps those inmates in
their cells today. We won't get a chance to talk about their entries for the
Pen Prison Writing Contest. The deadline for that is only a few weeks away.
Nothing to do about it. I can't go in and they can't come out.
My bus pulls into the roundabout and I wait for the officers to disembark. It's
shift change time and the bus is packed with uniformed, badge and weapon
wielding men and women who smile and joke as they step down, glad that their
Saturday shift is over.
I see evidence of flood when we pass over the culverts on the way to Santa
Rita. Water ran last night, under the bridges; it smoothed out the sand,
sculpted it into meandering beds. The sand tells the story of being carried
through the darkness, left in a new place, waiting for the next flood to travel
again.
Once I have my radio and am through the electric gates of the Santa Rita yard,
I pass men waiting in line for "meds" or some other appointment. A
few look sick, in pain. I feel their eyes on me, appraising, sizing me up,
trying to place me. One asks how he can get into the workshop. I stop and
explain the process of submitting a "kite," as a guard signals for me
to follow him to the education wing where he unlocks a door to an air
conditioned room.
He leaves me to set up.
I wait. The thunder continues. I hear laughter from the visitation area on the
other side of the wall. No one comes.
After forty five minutes I knock on the thick window of the control room. I ask
that they turn the men out for the workshops. The guard looks annoyed or
embarrassed and makes the calls.
When the men show up, we have only half an hour left.
I ask if anyone wants to read.
Heathco, one of the regulars of the workshop, speaks up and says he wants to
read first.
"My father died three weeks ago," he says. "In the last year, we
kinda ... reconnected. We been writing back and forth and he even sent me a
story about how he found who he was, how nature helped that, one time when he
shot a bird, an Indian hen, when he was only about ten years old. That got me
to write more to him about what my life has been....I want to read a poem I
wrote to him before he died, one I know he received and read the day he
passed."
He reads three pieces: the poem, the story his father wrote to him, about a
time he shot and killed a sacred bird, and a reflection on the two other
pieces.
He is moved. The other men are quiet. Rain falls. We can hear thunder, close
now.
"I never was much what I would call spiritual, but I have to say that I
have seen someone out the corner of my eye lately, and that person looks like
my father. When I turn to see him straight on, he's not there."
We talk some more, but run out of time. A guard comes into the room and assumes
a wide stance. The men get quiet as I give them an assignment for the next
workshop.
They leave and I pack up my tub. I make my way out past the window, turn in my
radio, and pass though the gates.
I wait again for the bus, now in the rain. I don't mind. I am not worried about
lightning.
On the bus, one of the guards asks me, in a sardonic, knowing tone, "Any
masterpieces today?"
"You might be surprised," I tell him.
I look out the window and think I hear answers rising from the patterns in the
sand, the sand left stripped by the rapture and memory of rain, the water that
runs at night.
Snoring Cellies on the Road to Parnassus*
It was a good workshop today. One of the yards was still locked down after a
two hundred man race riot the week before, so the workshop was smaller than
usual and more solemn.
We read the poem "What the Doctor Said" by Raymond Carver. Carver
depicts in the poem his being told he has advanced lung and brain cancer. He
writes:
He said it doesn’t look good
He said it looks bad in fact real bad
He said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before I
quit counting them
I said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know
About any more being there than that.
His unsentimental conversation portrays the ways we deny and avoid our
mortality, until it knocks on the door of here and now. Many of the men in the
workshop have medical conditions, some of them serious. The poem struck a chord
of empathy and the no-nonsense, understated gravity of the subject fit with the
rules of the conversational road that govern prison discourse.
Later in the poem, the doctor asks
Are you a religious man
Do you kneel down
In forest groves and let yourself ask for help
When you come to a waterfall
Mist blowing against your face and arms
Do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments?
While I can't imagine these actual words passing between doctor and patient,
they pushed the poem from medical bad news into spiritual questions, the kinds
of questions literature and the arts, if they are good, deal with. I told them
about William Carlos Williams writing “It is difficult to get the news from
poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” The
gist of the discussion became one about ways that the arts are a way to cope
with the big questions, the hard issues -- tragedy, trauma, loss, and love.
The men in the workshop are not what I would call sensitive types. The tattoos
and tough poses make it hard to raise such topics, but once raised, the inmates
are not afraid to talk or to listen.
One of the men said that the thing he dislikes most about being in prison is
that he is never alone, that he has no inner life. He has to work from 5:30 AM
until 6:30 PM, stay out of trouble, and keep up his guard. "The place is
noisy," he says. "My cellie** talks and snores. When we were locked
down, I actually had some time to think, to think about my family outside, and
read. I read the whole copy of the Missouri Review. It was good; all
those guys know how to write, technique-wise anyway, but I have to say I'm not
smart enough to get half of what they are talking about."
Join the club, I thought to myself. That is much of the fashion of academic literature
these days. It strives at times to be as opaque as possible, with labyrinthine
structures that make finding meaning difficult at best. But that's another
essay.
His other point about an interior life is one well-taken. Whether in prison or
out in the "free world," quiet and focus are in short supply. Writing
is one of the better ways I gain access to those inner spaces. But writing does
not always serve to connect the inner with the outer.
"Well write clearly and well about what you want to write about." I
said. "Having a message is not a bad thing, but don't let a simple message
get in the way of the art. And don't let high flying art get in the way of a
message if you have one."
We talked about what makes writing art, as opposed to, say, journalism or porn,
and about publishing and what kinds of writing will likely make it into our
literary Magazine, Rain Shadow. One of the men asked if he could tell it
like it was on the streets, "having to break doors down and stuff. Don't
people need to know that? Would they read about it?"
I asked "Are you kidding? Look at half the stuff on television and film.
People love that stuff. But I won't publish cheap shots or sensationalism that
has no literary merit. No glorifying violence or drugs. No bragging about
crime. There's plenty of that, but not much quality writing about the hard
truths."
"Here's some bad news," I continued. "There is not much of a
market for quality writing. Happy endings, the good guys winning, the world
going to hell in a hand-basket -- yes. But not complex human stories."
Sometimes, I think, I write for the sake of what needs to be said, no matter
whether or not anyone will read the words, art (if I can call it that) for the
sake of itself, or for the artist, or for the desire to connect.
Then one of the inmates read a poem "If Yes Were All That Was" about
what his world would be like with opportunity. It was a good poem and I will
type it up this week. Other men were writing ideas on their writing pads, the
illegal materials of marking a life. We had broken through to something,
something bodering on magic, on timelessness, on touching something as subtle
as it is elusive.
The workshop ended as a guard rattled his keys, a sign to shut it down.
We returned desks and chairs to their original places, and packed up the
magazines, books, and folders. I carried the tub out of the room as the guard
closed and locked the door.
I followed the inmates down the hall to the door that leads to the gate before
opening onto the yard. From the back they walked like any group of students I
have seen after a good class. They were the ones that made it that way. Muses
have a way of finding these moments no matter where they take place.
Cowboy
He looks the part -- beat-up wide brimmed hat (prison
orange), lanky gait, wry smile. And when he talks, stories about Yuma ranches
and desert animals come pouring out.
My first take on him was that the stories were corny old re-runs of cowboy
lore, but as he kept talking, they took on the sheen of freshly lived
experience. I realized this guy was the real deal, that Cowboy had been living
in some back water time capsule of horses, cattle, mules, dusty work, and long
stretches between visits to town. His writing was about as unaffected as any I
have read. It was just the facts, told with an unvarnished voice.
There was style, living pathos, and charm in the stories about favorite dogs,
donkeys, and Yuma history.
I thought he should submit some of his work to Arizona Highways or other
glossies that eat up the old and nostalgic West. But that cost money for
postage, and Cowboy was indigent as well as untutored in query letters. If he
ever sent any out I never heard that he got a response.
His was a world in stark contrast to the urban blight in the background of most
of the other members of the workshop. Where they looked for a shocking detail,
an edge that might cut into a reader's complacence, Cowboy lulled his audience
into sleepy world where trains still ran, outlaws had an anti hero stardom, and
pick-up trucks were less common than horses.
The editors decided to publish a few of his pieces, the first he ever
published. Cowboy was pleased, but that's about it. It was no big deal, but he
did want us to send a copy of the magazine to family. The last piece he wrote
in the workshop boded well for the stories to come.
Color
of Money
In 1984 I was driving a cattle
truck. I had loaded 45 head of fat
cattle at John Wayne’s Red River Ranch down at Stanfield, AZ. I was headed west to a packing house in East
Los Angeles, traveling on I-10 through Indio, CA, running 20 miles over the
speed limit. I was pulled over by the
CHP. I was watching the officer out of
my mirror as he was walking up to the cab.
He stopped alongside the trailer and he put his head up close to one of
the observation holes just as a steer was taking a shit. Well, you can guess what happened. Cop gets up to my cab and looks up at me, and
he is covered in shit from his fancy trooper hat down to his silver buckle.
He says,
“Driver, I’ve been on the force 20 years, and I have taken a lot of shit. But this is the first time I ever ate
it. Driver, get your ass down the road
and you better say nothing.”
He’s
looking straight at me as I say, “Yes, sir.”
A bull hauler knows green when he sees
it, and that officer was all over with the color of money, a color that I could
sure use at the end of my day.
The
Professor
Standing in the cold, beneath a half
moon, wind blowing from the north, waiting for a bus, Dick and I make small
talk. I want to tell him I am in awe if what he does with the inmates in the
writing workshop. He would not think it appropriate and would shrug it off. We
are carrying empty plastic tubs. When we came in, they were full of books,
pads, pens, and magazines.
Dick’s hair has grown out and
started to curl. It’s the color of a baby’s, the lightest shade red hair can
have; but Dick is no baby. He has been at this for a long time.
We met earlier tonight in the
parking lot in front of the Main Gate at the Arizona State Prison Complex in
Tucson. He gave me the heavier of the two tubs, explaining that he had pulled
muscle along his rib cage and could not breathe all that well. We make small
talk as we pass through the metal detectors and then entered the sally port. We
had badges from our photos and names and expiration dates. A bus wearing a sign
for Santa Rita sped, an apparition out of the darkness, and screeched to a
stop. It exhaled hot air as the doors opened and an inmate greeted us.
The race with invisible competitors
began and I hung on to my tub, glad that I had seat. A barren, raked plain
streaked past the windows, white under the moon.
Santa Rita’s doors are right next to
the bus stop making it look more like a hospital than a prison. We entered and
were let in to the visitors room through electric doors. The lighting was bad,
but the tables were set up in orderly pattern, on the diagonal, with plastic
chairs.
“You think we could get more light?”
I asked, noticing that about half of the inmates would be sitting in the dark.
Dick tried the switch. All of the
lights went out. He turned it back on. They stayed off. “Oh Shit,” he said,
“now we’re really in the dark.”
I tried the switch. Same result. I
asked to be let through the electric doors back to the control room and was
given permission to do so. “Do you know how to turn on the lights?” Shrug.
I went back and we searched but to
no avail.
Then I noticed that one of the bulbs
was flickering back on. Must be one of those half-dead fluorescent lights, I
muttered. As a few of them came back on we noticed that there were no inmates.
Back though the electric doors. “Of
they’re under ICS. Someone found some clothes in a dumpster, so they have to do
a count.”
“How long will that take?”
Shrug.
OK let’s wait I think to no one in
particular.
Dick and I sit and talk about this
and that. He tells me he visited Emily Dickinson’s house while on tour with his
new book. “She lived in a mansion. Twenty acres at least, and a huge house.”
We go on about Whitman and Simic and
Mary Oliver and Sam Hamill. I won’t tell you what he said about Sam.
An hour passes. I am relieved to
think we might be leaving.
Then the first of the inmates shows
up. Then a flood of orange jumpsuits and jackets comes through the door. “Good
evening Mr. Shelton.” Hey Mr. Shelton.”
“How you doin Mr. Shelton?” The air is immediately congenial, relaxed,
almost playful.
The guys take seats around the
table. Dick calls out names and distributes folders. The inmates talk about the
assignments they have done. Take one line, it is raining and us that to compose
some vignettes.
After that initial draft, they will
economize, will cut some of the repeated phrases. Let them be suggested.
He asks if some of them want to
read. They do. They read well. John and Steve and Mr. Garcia. After the reading there are comments. Dick
puts me on the spot a few times. I zero in. They seem to think it’s OK, but I
am not so sure. Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m just going to do the best I can.
“Let’s hear that again.” “Pass that
up here and let me take a look at it.” Take that back and re-work and bring it
in again.”
Then a man reads about his crack cocaine
addiction. The piece ends with some “Glory to God” comment, more fitted for a
revival meeting than a writing workshop.
“The ending might be unnecessary,”
Dick says.
“I knew you were going to say that,”
the inmate laughs. “I knew it.”
“Well it is rather abstract and
maybe unnecessary.”
“It is an important piece though, a
breakthrough of sorts.” What I hear is that the content for the man is much
more important the quality of the writing here. This piece requires a different
kind of response.
Another man reads. This one is
lovely, is read as a poem and takes the term from temperature, to emotional
state, to spiritual hunger and soul’s despair.
“Let me see how that is written,”
Dick says.
The man passes it to the front of
the table. All eyes are listening. Dick reads them again. He points out that
the lines of the poem are really sentences and that the piece might be better
read as a prose piece. He mentions “The Bus to Vera Cruz” as an example of
something he was working on, but that would not fit as a poem.
“I am convinced that any piece of
writing can be successful if you can find the right form.”
Silence. I think we are all aware
that there this is some great advice. I am taken by the simple profundity of
the line and its implications for any student of writing.
“Take this back and re-work it as a
prose piece and then let’s look at it again.”
A man reads a piece he has written
before. It is a scene of domestic tension, of trying to stay out of a spat with
an irate wife. The men laugh at places that ring too true, maybe too familiar.
“It’s a nice scene. There is some
tension there, some good dialogue.” What do you think Erec?
“I like it when Steve tells us his
thoughts about wanting to avoid conflict, and how it seems inevitable given the
portrayal of the woman.” Then changing track a little, I go to the content.
“It’s a good idea sometimes to just head for the bomb shelter and close the
hatch until the destruction is over.”
“You know,” says Dick, “Some men can
avoid the conflicts by stepping aside, others by leaving, and still others
attack.” He makes a gestures of surging forward with a sword. The guys nod in
agreement.
“When I was doing the women’s
workshop, the one I did for about seven years, I had one woman who was very
flirtatious, very good looking and I was taken with her.”
“I bet Mrs. Shelton didn’t hear
about this,” one of the guys snickered, conspiratorially. A few others nodded.
“Then, two other women took me aside
one day and said ‘Dick, you know that she did not just kill one, but TWO of her
husbands.’ “
The table laughed and deep laugh of
delight. There was more at work, of course, than humor here.
“Shall we continue? Who else wants
to read?”
Another man reads a poem that stops
us all in our tracks. It is about love and self deception, about helplessness
and sleep. “Beer bottles fall from our drunken hands and crash to the floor. We
do not know if they fell or if we dropped them.” The lines drift out into the
circle of men and then hang there in a raw truth and sharp beauty. I am
stunned. All of us are stunned.
“I think it is brilliant,” Dick
says. “What do you think, Erec?”
“I think it’s ready to publish.”
“Give that to me and I’ll get it
re-typed.” The Holy Grail of the workshop, the destination, the ringing bell of
accomplishment usher in the moment of royalty. This is magic I think to myself.
Our surroundings are poor. Materials primitive. Yet, the atmosphere of
learning, motivation, and collegiality is charged with intensity.
“Can you help with the tables?” Dick
asks when it is time to go. I join in moving the tables. We set them back into
the ordered pattern, under the dim lights. We are again back in prison, but not
before shaking hands, wishing a happy holiday, and gathering up the sign up
sheets.
The electric doors slide open to let
us out into the cold night air. A wind is building out of the north. A cold
front is coming in. I carry the warmth of the room, the excitement of the talk
with me into the night. We stand under a light, hoping the driver will see us,
will appear of darkness, surge to a stop, swing open the door with its blast of
heat.
I want to tell him that I see. I am
still trying to find the words.
The
Hard Days
Saturday. It is still
dark, and Simone the cat snores contentedly at the foot of the bed. I want the
darkness never to end, to let me remain here in half sleep. But that is not
what's happening today.
Demons have pinned me to the sheets; my arms and legs feel like lead, but I
have to lift them, to move, to get ready to go out to the prison.
These mornings are tense at home. I am angry, irritated, in a hurry. I need to
be alone with preparation for the prison, but Megan wants to talk, wants help
with house tasks, wants, deservedly so, to have some Saturday time together.
I can't blame her but neither can I tell her about the skein of snakes in my
head, the twisting pressure on my heart, the sense of doom.
My mind speaks only curses. Something here is dangerous, better left alone. It
coils, hisses, threatens.
But I turn away from the demons and give her some of the morning.
We take a bike ride to a cafe so we can make plans, have the conversations
married couples have.
I try to forget where I am going, what it will take to gird my loins to gather
the will to cross no man’s land and meet men who remind me too much of myself,
the self I have run from.
As soon as I can, I enter the transition of going to the prison. I put on my
worn-in-the-seat prison pants, shoes, conservative button-down shirt, nerdy
reading glasses, and get the plastic tub that will contain the supplies that I
have to pick up on the way: books, magazines, pens, dictionaries, thesauri,
folders. An inmate wants a copy of Dante's Inferno. Another wants A
Course in Miracles. Another wants a book about writing poetry. Many want
erotic novels like Fifty Shades of Gray or The Girl With the DragonTattoo.
I stop at an office supply store and a couple of used book stores. I also get
something to eat. It's going to be a while before I am back out.
A waitress at the taco joint knows my routine, knows where I am going, has a
relative who is incarcerated, and treats me to a drink. It's part of the
Saturday ritual.
Then I head to my office at the university. There I will print out the turnout sheets,
call the prison to make sure it is not locked down, and take some time to gird
my loins, comfort my fears, settle in to the next four hours.
When it is time, I load the tubs, stack the inmate drafts, pin on my ID badge,
and start the car. I do not listen to radio or give in to any distractions like
engaging the shithead driver that just cut me off. I head south, to the
industrial part of town: the belching power plant, the contaminated wells near
the sprawling complexes of the defense contractors, the truck stops, trailer
courts, the underbelly of Tucson.
Traffic is usually heavy when I merge onto Interstate 10. Big semis don't want
to slow or move over to let me on, but I wedge my way into the stream and fly
along with the river of commerce and the road.
At my exit, I feel the prisons, both federal and state. It's an energy field
that extends a few miles out from the actual places. Maybe this is
psychological, but it feels physical, and I am confident that someday, when we
have instruments capable of measuring such things, that it will become a
measurable entity.
I want to turn around, to recoil, to run, but I press ahead. Don't ask me why.
Then I am in it, and I gradually get used to it, like anyone gets used to cold
water after swimming a few minutes. I shut off my personal sensibilities and
simply act. I override my entitlement to a Saturday, a day off, and shut down
the images things I might do: watch a game, go for a hike, ride a bike,
luxuriate with a book, grade papers.
I grab the tub and rest it on my hip, like I would carrying a toddler, and head
for the Main Gate.
Strangely, I am attuned to the place, notice the stunted, twisted barrel cacti,
the harshly pruned, grotesque ocotillos, the flapping flag of the state of
Arizona, the scraped earth. Inmates walk with a submissive deference, are
polite. Guards look at me suspiciously -- "Creative Writing??" -- but
do their jobs of opening the electric doors of the sally port.
I board the bus and head to Rincon, the medium high security unit. The driver
watches me in the mirror; I don't know what he is looking for, and his eyes
betray nothing. He opens the door, and I descend the stairs to the walkway that
leads to no man's land.
I take a moment to look. I look hard, straight at my path, and meet the
reality. Here is the place where men are confined, detained, broken.
But, in spite of the ubiquitous and constant theft of humanity, something
endures. There glows an ember, a hunger to say what needs saying, to record, to
witness, to escape, to capture a thought, turn it over in one's hand.
Then I recognize that hunger in myself, and I remember. I remember being
beneath the wheel, of losing a sense of awe, wonder, hope, trust. I
remember wanting to undertake the hard work or wooing those parts back home,
out of hiding.
Was it so long ago?
And I enter no man's land and realize that, yes, I have to pass through in
order to reach the other side.
It seems so far to travel here in no man's land, but I pass through the razor
wire not to save someone else, but to recover the lost and exiled pieces of
myself.
Demon
A lady killer, heart-throb, lover, dream-boat, eye candy, and more, Demon could
charm the birds out of the trees. His nick name had more to do with his
frenetic energy than it did with any menacing behavior. He could just as easily
been labeled "Angel."
But Demon it was, as in "he wrote like a demon," when he wrote, which
wasn't as often as I would have liked. He was too busy doing tattoos on the
side in a prison that forbade tattooing. He wanted to do one on me.
"I'll bring my needle, " he said one time in workshop. "We could
do it right here." He looked around the Programs Room, with its blackboard
that had no chalk, the bare walls, the ceiling tiles stained by roof leakage.
"You mean you have a tattoo gun?" I asked incredulously.
Don't ask me how or where or any other logistic details about such a thing. All
I know is that contraband makes it into prison. One week, a brick of black tar
heroin had been found in the false bottom cavity of an inmate's drawer. I swear
that there are times when I see stoned inmates on the yard. It's a testimony to
desires finding a way, and I would not be shocked to hear that inmates have
ways to get cell phones or more exotic goods.But a tattoo gun?
"You never heard nothing from me," he said, smiling, meaning, yes.
I couldn't believe it, but it was just another in the series of surprises that
Demon brought to the workshops.
He was an artist. A real artist. In another life he might have been a famous
painter, or film director, or, maybe, poet. In terms of "human
capital," his stock could have demanded a premium. That it did not is
nothing less than tragic. His physique suggested Adonis, and his tattoos, which
were numerous, were the quality that comes only at the highest price. There was
a portrait of Marilyn Monroe on his shoulder blade; vines with roses grew down
his calf; some kind of reptile snaked up his forearm and rested on his
shoulder, looking viewers in the eye. Some of them he had done himself; others
were executed under his close oversight and standards.
I considered the offer, for the briefest of delusional seconds. The vision of a
corrections officer opening the door with the volunteer being tattooed would
signal the end of the writing workshops.
"You know I can't do that," I said.
"Just wanted you to know I'm willing. I'd do it for free," Demon
said, big grin filling his face.
His tatts, as they were, did not confrom to the gang-banger, macho type, and I
could tell from the workshop dynamics that his work, or his unwillingness to
work, was something of an "issue" out on the yard. He didn't conform
to blunt authority all that well. His writing was a testimony to that.
He was a free spirit in a world where that can land you in prison, and it had.
To hear it from him, all he was interested in was doing his art (top priority)
and chasing romance (very close second), always the gentleman. I read many
episodes of beach lovemaking in Mexico, dangerous romances with the consorts of
drug lords, tourists looking for a lark with an exotic tattoo artist.
There were also the drug arrests, the automatic weapons to the back, the rough
treatment, beatings, and cross-border extradition. He told me he was working on
a book-length work and asked me to type up several chapters. They were good,
but needed work to become publishable.
He told his story the way he did everything: with ebullience and passion. While
his techniques were primitive, his learning curve with language was steep, and
he climbed it with like a man starving for what lay above.
Here is a poem he wrote.
I am the Mess You Chose
Banking constant dollars
In Big Big Business
As I’ve strung a lasso
Round about neck high
To your high-heeled legs.
Penguin suits can solemnly dare.
Stare stone split stares
A shore of foam…
Unrecorded violence
In sympathy my last, Black
Séance is a note
To your condemnation.
Tear a curtain shredded
As Samson is shaved
Bald, signs for weakness brightened
A cold industry abandoned
Damaging single mothers
My son is now your target.
Stop me now?
I’ll just stumble atrociously
Never to be broken
Simply manic.
The understanding swells.
May I have a horse
At the end of my rope?
It’s me tatted down you chose
A rifle I have eaten. Afterlife
A haven for parasites
Just a movie forgotten
Pathetic pansies!!!
I was chosen.
The
intensity here was no less than every piece he brought to the workshops. In
some ways, I didn't know what to say to him. He had gone into a language that
was so rich and playful that it was beyond me to make constructive critique.
Then,
as often happens, he was "rolled up," moved off the yard after his
tattoo needle was confiscated. I heard that things had gone badly when they
found his gun.
I
never got that tattoo and have been spoiled for considering one from a lesser
artist. I hope Demon doesn't relent, that he keeps his high pitched passion,
that his art thrives in the soil of his many liaisons, his humming, exigent
genius.
The
Talker
J., The Talker,
rattled on about the race riots as we drove away from the half-way house. It
was his first day out on his own. He had a place now and would sleep in if he
wanted, come and go without having to check in, could get a cell phone, a
camera, stay out late. The state said he could not drink. The Feds said he
could.
"I'll go with the Feds," he said as we drove east, toward the sun and
his new place.
"If you're white -- or brown, or black, or whatever the wrong color is in
that moment -- and in the way, you'll get it," he said. "They don't
care what you think in those moments. Like I'm an independent. It doesn't
matter to them."
He talked more prison politics. He was open about it. Even though he was out
and likely done with it, he still worked at it, let it out.
"The shot callers make you do things."
He had a few plastic bags of clothes and a red electric guitar, China Girl,
because it was red, real red, like high-gloss Chinese enamel.
"You're just in it," he said. "The riots are like a
tornado or a wild fire. One instant it's all happening over there, and then,
Bam!, it's right next to you, right in your face. And you gotta act. No choice,
man."
As J. talked, I thought of starlings, hundreds of thousands of starlings, in
flight, in a flock, winding and shifting, and breathing like a giant organism
made up in coordinated individuals. They are subject to the group movements,
the group whims, thoughts and decisions and forces bigger than single members
of the flock.
Ornithologists call these gatherings murmurations, perhaps for the whispering
sounds they make and wings beat in unison.
Yet, no birds drop from the sky, beaten and damaged from those murmurations.
Race riots leave bodies broken and bleeding on the yard. Property gets trashed.
Starlings move according to some ancient urgings. The shots get called somehow,
but they work to get the flock home to roost, to follow wind currents that make
migration more efficient.
Humans play by rules too. The flock rules are more about beliefs than air
currents. We live in swirling abstractions that we construct and enforce.
Individuals play along or pay the price being exposed and alone.
Which tribe do you belong to? How much do you make? What do you do? Are you wi
me or agin me?
We aren't a flock trying to survive the elements, we are tribes vying for
advantage over each other.
But we admire the starlings, post videos of their fluid clouds of changing
shapes, the governing rules of wind currents, and dancing grace, of choreography
and shared vision.
J. knows how the human flock can move, how it can be a steamroller that crushes
its own kind. He has no illusions. He is re-entering the stream, playing a new
game. The rules, contrary to what the starlings deal with, are malleable, can
be revised.
Starlings roost rather than crash and burn. I guess you gotta know where you
want to end up.
I hope J. gets to run with starlings now that he is out of the pen. We'll fly,
crazy busy, but watching the wings and sensing the changes in the weather.
The Long Road
The road to the
prison is a long one, and you will want to turn around before you drive past
the melting tar, hot-engine smell of the power plant. You will think briefly of
all the other things you might do today -- go for a hike, work in the garden,
watch the basketball game -- but you will settle in to the sound of the car as
you merge onto the interstate, doing what you need to do.
You will look into the mirror and see the face of an old man, the bags and sag
of the face you thought you would never have. You will feel tired, maybe sick,
all of a sudden as you make the turn south. Do not go numb when you see the
towers of the federal penitentiary off to the right. Do not hope that the
guards will be waiting at the entrance behind a barricade that says no admittance.
You may cringe when they say "I'd like to kill all of them," because
they are frustrated and afraid and impatient. Do not smile when they call the
men in your workshop cockroaches, rats, or worse.
You may tell yourself that you are not up to this, not bright enough, not
ready, nor skilled enough, that you have no business asking men in a cage to
hone their expressive skills. You certainly will not feel driven by some
principle of fairness or service. You may remember something from years ago, a
time when a man with a badge read charges against you, that he said you were
going to jail. You might also remember the pucker of your nether regions as you
think of the pills and weed hidden in the pockets of your girlfriend's purse,
that because she was the daughter of The Man, and had a stack of traveler's
checks, that they did not search her the way they did you. You will remember
shame and gratitude, the feel of your car keys, your wallet, your watch, as you
carried it all out of the courthouse back into a morning bright and clear with
mountain sun. You may or may not remember that you wished someone would tell
this if you went down.
You will have to smile instead of argue when they ask why inmates need paper,
pens, dictionaries and books. You may have to lie when they ask if you plan to
leave any of this with them so they can take it back to their cells where they
will settle back onto their racks and think about what to say and how to say
it.
As you carry the tubs you will look away from the blood spots on the sidewalk
that go on for thirty yards and will not wonder what could have happened here.
The tattoos on the neck of a member of the AB, the Aryan Brotherhood, will not
scare you, even when he challenges you on why you think his friend's poem is
overly cliched and sentimental and full of racist jargon.
If you forget that it is you who are the lucky one, that you might be confined
here, then you will be lost. You have the comforts that you only dreamed of
when you stood on the side of a road, with no money, in the cold. Or the time
your boss reminded you that you were on the clock, so do that damned job over
again, even if it's already done and done right.
The live wire of memory may be too much, so you will push it away. Try pain
killers, but they will not silence for long the whispers, even when those
voices are smothered in the cotton of comforts. You may want someone to do the
work for you or someone to take care of you, but you know that it is up to you.
But still, you pack up the books and papers when the time is up. You cover the
sore with a bandage and go back out into the noise of the free world.
Eat. Go back to sleep. That is the way to keep going, to get by, to take
shelter from the wind.
Wingnut
He is wiry. Compact, thickly muscled, and what in other days
was called jaunty. His nappy hair he wears braided. He tends to carry an
expression of amusement, of some joke he knows that no one else has gotten.
He also has a far-off look in his eyes.
I guess he is what many would call mentally unstable, part of why he is in
prison, most likely.
Prison is, after all, where we put many of our mentally ill after the Reagan
Era terminated funding for their care in hospitals.
I don't know what brought him to the writing workshops, but he has become one
the regulars for the last several years. He sits across from me, and nods a
lot. He writes odes to God and says he sees things most people don't.
He is also impulsive, and quick to take magazines or dictionaries that I offer.
Sometimes the other inmates don't appreciate that, so I have to be careful
about how those resources get distributed.
A week ago, he very ceremoniously presented me with a letter of sorts. He said,
"Give this to your wife. I know she will like it." He was adamant
about this.
What he did not know is that M. is struggling. She is going through a dark
night and looks for comfort in soulful music, poetry, and close friends.
"You give this to her," he said again. "She'll know."
Now, you may be thinking something like "This guy is a wing-nut,
half-a-bubble-off-plumb, bonkers, not-playing-with-a-full-deck," or other
off-the-rails expression. And you would be correct. But consider some of the
following.
Last spring, before I took a hiatus from the workshops to work on the house in
New Mexico, Mr. L. took me aside as I walked to the guard house and sally port.
He looked straight at me, hard. "Now, you listen... You have some kind of
truck, right?"
"Yes."
"Well, you need to careful. I'm just telling you. You need to be careful
driving that truck. Because there is a lot of trouble out there, and some gonna
come to you. So you drive slow and careful."
As I turned to leave, he stood there and spoke to my back. "You be careful
up there. You and that truck. You drive careful."
I didn't think much of it, but did remember that he seemed to know when I was
coming to the workshop. He told me that he could "see" me coming down
the road, from miles away. He knew, even when the guards told him otherwise, that
I was coming to meet the writing workshops. "They said you weren't coming,
but I knew you were. I told the guys so."
When I returned to the workshops at the end of summer, Mr. L. was first in line
and made a bee line to me and asked "So, how's your truck? Is it bad? You
look OK."
I had said nothing, but had been in an accident, been T-boned in Gallup in an
intersection. The truck was nearly totaled.
"You gonna fix it? Can you fix it? Everything OK? You
need to be careful about that front end."
Remember, I still had said nothing. The truck had been hit right at the front
wheel. The impact knocked us into the oncoming lane. If I had been going any
faster, the collision would been absorbed by the door, behind which Megan sat.
"It's going to cost a lot, but the truck will be fixed," was all I
said.
"Is your wife OK?"
"She was a little shaken up, but she is good," I said, as other men
filed in and Mr. L. took his place across from me at the table. He spent the
day nodding in assent, smiling when he caught my eye, as the other men read
their work.
That was six months ago. Since then, he keeps checking in, following me to the
guard house after the workshops. He has not offered up any more warnings or
advice beyond "I knew you were coming today. I saw you."
I kept all of this in mind when I presented Megan with the card. She opened it
and found a hand-drawn heart surrounded by flowers, all if it intertwined, all
of it on a manila file folder transformed into art. This came from a man who
has no "official" access to paints, Exacto knives, brushes, or
markers.In fact, those things are contraband.
M. found the card soothing, lovely, meticulously crafted.
I put the card on the mantel with the other Christmas cards.
I'll have to ask Mr. L. about it when I see him next, if I
do.
Turn Your Lights On
It is the winter solstice and it is raining. Cold too. I am driving out to the
prison for the workshops with the heat on. Clouds cover the mountains, where
snow is falling. Roads into the high country are closed. The prison is in a low
spot, a cold sink, a depression between the Santa Rita, Rincon, and Catalina
mountain ranges. Concrete, a great "thermal mass," holds and radiates
the chill. I'll have to wear a jacket.
In spite of the gray skies and winter wind, I feel pretty good. I am carrying
colored pens, composition journals and other Christmas goodies for the men in
the workshop. My little pickup is a kind of sleigh, and I am a 200 pound elf.
I know there are others around the state doing similar work. Richard Shelton
still goes out to the Federal Penitentiary, just off to my left as I drive down
Wilmot to the Arizona State Prison. There are workshops in Florence.Writing
produced in all of these workshops is included here in the third edition of Rain
Shadow.
That is a comfort as I get close to my destination.
The layers of complication and worry that fill my regular life as teacher,
householder, and aging writer peel away as I approach the prison.
I feel lighter, simpler, clearer. I feel a twinge of -- dare I say it --
purpose, though not the purpose you might think. I started doing the workshops
for all the wrong reasons. As what psychologists call a "high verbal"
type, I thought I had something to give, some directive guidance to
publication. I was going to fix things.
It hasn't exactly gone that way. It's more of a two-way exchange, where I get
more than I give.
Like all writers, the men in the workshops give me a window onto worlds I
wouldn't otherwise know. Some of the writing carries light, joy, and humor,
while more of it is witness to the ragged edges of twenty-first century
society. It bears witness to poverty, drug use, violence, abuse, mental
illness, bad luck -- all of the contributing elements behind incarceration.
The men shed light on realities that I would otherwise miss or, I am
embarrassed to say it, willfully ignore. They are my teachers, guides into
places otherwise left out of the spotlights of media attention. They are the
front line in a system that works to make profit out of locking up the socially
marginalized.
We engage in exchanges, dialogue, share new vocabularies. I bring them terms
like "narrative distance:"; they give me "tweaking" and
"bums." The language men create in tight, shared spaces is a living
thing, a creature born of situation. The richness of it carries the scent of
humanity coping with the impossibly hard time.
In the workshop, I am facilitator for these human stories, a big-boned mid wife
for ideas that need a form in order to be born into a bigger audience than the
workshop. We humans want to be heard, and these guys want the free world to
know they are still here, still wanting, dreaming, loving.
It's a pretty simple role. I just show up and grease the wheels of expression.
I don't know how the inmates look at it though. Some of them may attend for the
pen and pad that they can sell of trade on the yard. Some may just want an
excuse to get out of their cells. They may be coming to the workshop for the
"wrong reasons" too. But they might find they have something to
say that they want someone to hear.
I try to make a space for that to happen.
It's not perfect I know. They maybe don't get what they want, or what they
might deserve, but they do get the gifts that life gives them. It's up to them
to take it from there.
So I drive out to the end of Wilmot Road, where a bunch of guys wait for the
chance to make it right, say it well. It is today, this shortest, rainy, cold
day, that I have to squint to see the road, to turn my lights on in these dark
days.
Curly
They call him Curly,
I guess because he has no hair. Most of his front teeth are gone too.
But he has dentures that he puts in for the workshop. He smiles often. Talks a
lot.
He has a mind of his own, and holds up a hand-written sign that says "I
refuse" when I ask him to do an assignment. He wants to write about his
religion, about perseverance, overcoming odds, acceptance, taking the hard path
rather than the garden variety of drugs, hookers, and violence.
Most often, the writing comes across as religious jargon, but lately he has
been infusing his spiritual message with image. "Your life is not a
problem/ hiding behind limousine/ tinted windows," one poem begins.
"Wow!" I say. "If life is not a problem hiding behind tinted
limousine windows, what is it?"
He is working at answering that one.
The change has been a long slog. We wrangle about his poems almost every
Saturday. He is confident in what he has to say, but not so confident in how he
says it. He doesn't want to listen to some university-trained white guy
critique his street poetry, especially if that white guy's first name is
Norman. That just doesn't fly.
We have known each other for about five years now, and I have spent more time
with him than with many of my closest friends or even family. He has become a
friend of sorts. I find myself thinking about him during my work week, and he
has written letters about writing to the students in my classes, especially the
ones who are struggling, who are first generation college students, students
who come from some of the same parts of town as he did, who face the same
challenges, the same temptations.
When I taught high school, a very bright student once asked me, in all
sincerity "Why should I listen to what you have to say about writing and
stuff, when I can make twice what you make dealing with my homies?"
I answered that money was not the only part of success and that prison was
likely part of the gang and drug equation. I suspect that I did not have much
cred, cred that Sultan likely would have had.
He shrugged, crossed his arms, and dropped out a few days later.
So, here is Sultan, the man on the other end on that road, learning to write
poetry. He has time, lots of time. And he reads. I brought him in an anthology
of Rumi's poetry, along with some Hafiz and some critical essays. He reads
these books and applies their messages.
He sits at my side in the workshop. He laughs hard and often, sometimes with
teeth, sometimes without. He listens to the other men in the workshop read. He
listens more closely than I do, and he is learning how to respond in ways that
they might hear. He tries not to offend or to alienate, but to reach and
connect.
He applies his spiritual beliefs.
Sometimes he takes what he calls "a hiatus." These breaks can last a
month or a year. I can't expect that he will ever come back, and I don't know
know what function these breaks from the workshop fulfill.
I suspect that he assimilates, broods, ruminates. He sits with his demons for
all I know. I feel the same way sometimes, but do not have the will to break
away and take the time let the swirling debris of my mind and my life settle.
When Sultan returns, he brings his usual fire, but now writes with more depth
and clarity. He has taken the insights into how to live a step further. I can
see it in the ideas. He is becoming a teacher, a minister, and in a less
flattering sense, a preacher.
It's too bad that preaching and poetry do not mix well, so we butt heads,
again.
He does not want to be told what to do and still holds up his hand-written
sign, usually with a toothy smile: "I refuse."
The
Shot Caller
An inmate in the prison workshops sat in the back for months
before speaking. When he finally spoke, it was to challenge my take on
one of the stories we were discussing. The story, to me, was a dead-end event
of violence and the comforts of drugs. He disagreed, with thinly veiled
contempt, with my recommendation that the writer consider an audience bigger
than a prison audience, other inmates.
He said he didn't care what the "free world" thought or understood of
prison life. He did not care if the story never incorporated some larger
significance, went beyond the mere incident. Further, he called into question
my authority to make any judgment about prison writing. I, after all, knew
nothing of prison life.
He scared me, and that was the first time, doing the workshops, I had felt that
way.
He was a "brother" in the AB, the Aryan Brotherhood, and had the
tattoos to broadcast his status. He was also an imposing figure, a wrestler
with the crushing hands, bulk, and neck of someone to steer clear of.
One time, during a lock-down, as chance would have it, he and I were the only
two in the workshop. Face to face for two hours. I told him he scared me, the
only inmate ever to do so. He smiled, and let down his guard a bit. He said he
had a reputation to maintain and that he could not afford to be seen with me,
or as anything like a teacher's pet, or even someone interested in something as
effete as writing.
I got it, and we began to play out our roles as nerdy teacher and tough-guy
disruptor with a little more humor. He began to write in ways that defied the
AB code. He even wrote a piece about a Jewish guard saving the life of a
skin-head. That piece was published recently in the The Sun, A Magazine of
Ideas.
He was transferred after about two years in the workshop, and I was sad
to see him go. I missed the energy he brought to our meetings, the incentive he
gave me to stay alert and on my teaching toes.
After the piece in The Sun came out, I heard that he was beaten nearly
to death, and had many bones in his face broken. The last news I heard was that
he was under protective custody. I don't know the motive behind the assault, or
who the perpetrators were, but doubt and disloyalty in certain groups is not
tolerated.
I also do not know it he ever saw the pieces I published in our inmate magazine
or if he ever received his copies of The Sun. I do know that he had the
guts to speak words that might get him shunned or worse, that he found a way
transmute some of his hate into a harsh and beautiful truth.
I will take copies of his story in to workshop this week and will see how the
inmates respond. I will let the truth speak for itself.
Here is a short version of the piece:
Skin
A
few years back I served time in the State Penitentiary in Winslow,
Arizona. They moved a middle-aged man
into my cell who called himself Tattoo D.
The
first time we went to the shower I noticed the swastika tattoo on his chest,
and when I asked about it, he confirmed that he was a skinhead. D. was nice enough to me, but he had a habit
of heckling the Correctional Officers, especially if the C.O.’s name plate
above their badge read “Cohen” or “Rosenberg.”
There was one C.O. in particular that Tattoo loved to hate. His name was Goldberg. D. would swear at C.O. Goldberg for the most
trivial infractions C.O.s are expected to follow.
About
six months after D. and I were cellies he overdosed on heroin. He was not conscious or breathing, and I
could not find a pulse. His lips, eyes
and nose were the blue of death. I
panicked and did the only thing I could think of; I started kicking the cell
door like a donkey and yelled “MAN DOWN!!” out into the cluster. When the C.O. came and looked into my cell, I
thought his eyes were going to jump out of his skull. He popped the cell door and began CPR on my
corpse of a cellie. Then more C.O.s came
and watched the scene unfold for a few minutes, until I heard one of them say
something I will never forget. He said,
“Hey, Goldberg, give it up, man, let that Nazi die.”
Goldberg
did not give up. He performed CPR on Tattoo D. alone for the entire 45 minutes
it took to get the medical staff to my cell.
When a female nurse finally took over for C.O. Goldberg and he stood up,
he looked exhausted¾his hair was messed up, he was
dripping sweat, and his glasses were at an odd angle. All he said as I was being locked back down
in my cell was, “I couldn’t stop. I
don’t think it would’ve been right.
Maybe he’ll change his mind about some things . . . if he lives.”
I
heard D. did live, although I haven’t run into him or Goldberg again throughout
my years in the system. I can’t say
whether or not a Jewish C.O. changed a skinhead’s mind about some things, but
he sure as hell changed mine.
Ravens
I pass the sign warning that anyone beyond this point should
be prepared to be searched or, in Spanish,“revisado.” I like that idea better.
I should be prepared to be revised. First drafts only up to this point. From
here on, you need to focus and figure out what the hell it is you want to say,
to do, and to act for a reason. Nobody except students write for no reason
other than their own.
The tubs are heavy with writing pads, pens, some magazines,
a few books of poetry, copies of inmate drafts that we will discuss. I set the
clear tubs down on the steel table so the guard can go through and check for
contraband. All of it is contraband, really, but usually the guard just sifts
through the pads, shuffles a few pages of the books to make sure they are not
hollowed out. He has no interest and likely thinks this stuff is worthless,
harmless, and a bit eccentric, if not insane. Why would anyone, including
inmates want to sit down and write only to have others critique it? The best
outcome is that the work might show up in an obscure journal somewhere, just
another crazy poem or story that weirdos would read.
Or at least that’s what I think when I look at his face. I
see a faint disgust mixed with bewilderment. Normally, he replaces the lids,
and I walk through the metal detector to pick up the tubs on the other side.
From here I have only to pass through the sally port and then I am in. I go
through this every Saturday, and watch but keep my thoughts to myself. I am
lucky and familiar enough that all of this protocol is routine. I see myself on
the other side already, under the roof, next to the shoe-shine station, waiting
for my ride.
There I will catch a bus and head on over to the Rincon
Unit, a two minute ride from the main gate. I will hear the electronic locks
snap open, like a bullet being chambered. I show my badge through the half-inch
thick, mirrored security glass and the invisible guard on the other side opens
the sliding electric door.
Musing on my near future, I wait, holding the tubs, feeling
my fingernails bend under the weight of them. When the guard signals me set
them down on the table, I do, before unloading my pockets of glasses, pen,
clip-on badge that allows me clearance, car keys, and any loose change. I am
ready to go through the metal detector when she asks me for the memo. I am
snapped out of reverie.
“What memo?” I ask.
“Your personal property memo that lists everything you are
taking in to the units.”
I don’t have this.
“I have never been asked for a memo before. This is for the
creative writing workshops. We’ve been running them for a long time.”
“You can’t take anything in that is not accounted for, and
you need to bring it all back out with you.”
“They need paper and pens to write during the week so we can
workshop on Saturdays. I have to leave them pads and folders.”
“Nothing is allowed in that doesn’t come back out.”
I think this is some of glitch, so ask to see a supervisor.
The guard says she will contact the sergeant, before re-entering the control
room. She points to a bench that looks like some of detention site. This is
where the drug sniffing dogs usually wait between checking visitors for drugs.
I wait forty five minutes. The sergeant, a blonde, heavy set
woman, emerges from a gray office complex, and walks, with a slight swagger,
toward me. I can see a trace of irritation in her face. I explain that the
materials are for the writing workshop and that I take them in every week and
leave them with the inmates.
“I’m sorry. But you cannot leave anything with the inmates.”
She looks at me, but doesn’t look at me, and is reciting policy. It’s her job.
“You can’t go in with anything not on your list. You won’t
be able to go in today.”
I can tell she is hoping that I will give up, go back to the
car with my tubs, and go home. I decide to bargain, and ask if I can take in a
file with copies of a poem by Sandra Alcosser, a poet who is coming in as a
guest speaker in a couple of weeks.
“We need to read samples of her work,” I say
matter-of-factly. Both of them look at me and each other. I keep going and offer to take the tubs back
to the car as a concession, going in with only my fig leaf of a file folder.
They consent. “But only this once,” as a way of winning this
battle.
So I take my contraband back to the car, lock it up, and
return for my revision. I pass
through the metal detector and the electric doors of the sally port and enter
the yard. I will have to figure this one out.
I count thirty-two ravens in a cottonwood tree over the DA,
the Dining Area, as I walk from the gate to the Education Building in the
Rincon Unit. Ravens whistle above me as they negotiate the gusty breezes. They
seem to like the razor wire and the dead trees, the military lettering of the
buildings – HU5 – the strafed austerity of the recreation area. I like them.
They mock us humans and our folly even as they benefit from our trash and
discards. They are not proud and take none of this seriously. OK, I say to
myself, so that’s the way it is. Fly high enough not to get caught and keep
your eyes on the cottonwood. If you’re lucky, no one will shoot you down.
Waves
Sand is pulled from
beneath my feet as the backwash of a wave retreats back down the beach. I sink
as the firmament that holds my weight is pulled with the ebbing and surging
surf. I lift my feet to get a better hold, back on top of the sand. I don't believe
that the ground beneath me is moving. Instead, I tell myself that I have ground
to stand on, and that pulverized stone beneath me is solid, permanent, that I
can rely on it to always be there. I ignore the evidence to the contrary, the
evidence that is right there below me, that the earth on which I stand is in
flux, constant change, movement, shifting. Rather than accept and admit the
truth of it, I sink my teeth and feet into an illusion that this shifting world
is dependable, trustworthy. I fasten to that, desperate that it be true. When
the sands shift I feel betrayed. The fact of change makes me angry enough to
fight against it. You know how that works. Might as well fight the tides. But
the mind is an ornery beast. It doesn't see that the sand both supports and
washes away, gives and takes, blesses and extracts, that there are great
kindnesses in those passing grains of sand. A friend buys you coffee, asks how
you are, surprises you with generosity that goes to the secret of your being.
Such a gift sustains and then passes. The passing opens up an opportunity to
reach to someone else who is sinking and afraid. A kindness given can help
deepen the fact of passing, the beneficence of seeing a truth head-on. It is
only in the act that the mind can learn. Kindness received. Kindness given. A
cycle of departure and return, a swirling violence of peace, grief, and joy,
all of it contained in the simple gaze that sees the sand as it is.
Prison
Pants
It is a Saturday, late afternoon, and I sit with my
decompression burrito after the prison writing workshops. I try not to spill
salsa on my prison pants. They are the only pants I own that the Arizona
Department of Correction’s State Prison, Tucson Complex, will allow inside the
yard, through the fence topped with concertina wire, past the drug sniffing
dogs. I don’t like them. They are stiff khakis, not my usual blue jeans, not
the comfortable cotton of leisure and laid back living of Tucson.
After the grime and cracked plastic, the overuse and
overcrowding of the prison, I need to sit and think and make the transition
back. It is quiet enough to sit and listen to the inmate’s voices before they
get washed away in the incessant noise of streaming entertainment that is part
of twenty-first century living.
Those voices fade soon after the bus ride to the gate, the
passing through the sally port, the music-filled car commute back into the
“free world.” There is so much noise out here that I have to listen hard to
remember what they said, how they said it, and let those voices settle into my
mind before I can forget them.
There is R., the San Francisco heroin addict who writes
sonnets and villanelles, and M. the armed robber making sense out of his
gangster past in bilingual free verse, and W. the skinhead and spiritual
philosopher who struggles with finding telling details to ground his abstract
musings. Each of them has a story, has a voice that rises out of, and
recognizes, the disaster of his life.
Many of them write better than my students at the university.
Sons and daughters of privilege, the students often can’t find time to read
required material, much less expend effort arranging words that will best
express a thought.
In the prison, even the tables we use in the writing class
have begun to delaminate and the stubs of pencils and cheap pens the inmates
use to write infuriate their large hands. The need for finesse plus too much
power equals frustration.
I have the rest of the day. Time. The inmates say they have
too much time. Maybe that is why the writing is often so good, why the learning
curve is so steep, why the improvement can be so dramatic. Boredom, mixed with
some fear, violence, and avoiding trouble, to be sure, but boredom and a quiet
tedium pervade the place. They have fewer distractions – no cell phones,
computers, I pods, very little television. Their lives slow-cook in routine,
deprivation.
Tedium, paired with opportunities like the writing workshops, can be the
catalyst for writing. Maybe the two together are necessary. When focus and
opportunity intersect, a chemical reaction between the two can join hunch with
expression. Here is what I see: if the intention, opportunity, practice,
and support are combined with reflection and collaboration even semi literate
writers can produce art. A corollary to this is that
absorbing work like writing can be an antidote for anxiety, medicine for
despair.
Any art requires discipline and surrender. Steady effort,
focus, and work, I find, are out of style, and in short supply. I forget that
writing requires commitment as well as inspiration. I want to pay attention,
have made the choice to attend to the work, but need reminders to do so.
I think about my own opportunities – laptop at the ready,
printers, copy machines, projectors, the amount of information at my command on
line and in the library – and notice that, rather than write, I opt for email
or surfing the web for the best deals on whatever I feel I need at the time.
Small talk, consumption, and sound-bites litter my days. I produce little
because I am free to be perpetually distracted. I choose it.
Maybe this craving for distraction is a human trait; maybe
it is a fatal flaw. Maybe we need to learn to listen again for those voices,
that way of thinking that arises from a need to pay attention and to consider
ways to say what needs to be said, to solve problems, even if doing so feels
slow, a little tedious, and uncomfortable.
The Free World
M. is out. Out of
prison, that is.
After many years behind bars, the long-term member of the writing workshop was
waiting for me outside my university writing class yesterday.
The man I was used to seeing on the yard was standing there in his
government-issue jeans, flannel shirt, and starchy new black baseball cap,
smiling. His sharp gaze, the perceptive eyes of an intellectual, musician,
writer, one-time film student shone through self-consciousness. He looked
uncomfortable in his new duds, but not at all like the prison type. He does not
wear the sleeves and ink so often the mark of time in prison.
Neither of us could believe it. I brought him into the class and introduced him
to students who were packing up, already off to their next class or job or
other commitment.
I stood there between two worlds -- the world of university teaching and prison
workshop. I could not reconcile them.
A lot has changed since he was first locked up. He has culture shock. He
responds by trying harder, speaking a bit too fast, trying to anticipate the
next phrase, thought, idea.
He wants to work, to have some purpose, to be left alone, to do something
good. He wants to shake off the con life, meet new people.
He doesn't know how to get there from here.
This free world is baffling, frustrating, strange. M. looks at things the way
they are.
I wish I could help him.
We talked about possible projects, jobs he might do. I said I would help him
look for a place, and maybe some handyman work. I did not know if anything
would come of my queries.
His life right now is the limbo of half-way houses, parole officers, and
bureaucratic wrangling.
He walks a lot and has large blisters from the trips between the house and
public health-care, social security, and reporting to overseers.
It's a life that saps confidence, that waits for a mess-up, a miss-step.
Prison looms over him, follows him everywhere.
The odds are stacked against him, but it is his life to make.
Freedom can be terrifying.
Country
Like many men who join the workshop, Country, or Inmate B., presented himself
as a bad-ass. He came trailing a reputation for quick kicks tied to a short
fuse. From what I heard, it was well-deserved. He was what men sometimes called
a “foot soldier,” an enforcer who carried out orders in the form of rewards or
beatings.
He had brought something to read and let me know that he wanted to go first.
After I went through greetings, introductions for the newbies,
announcements, passed out writing pads, pens, a few books, magazines, thesauri,
dictionaries, and gave a brief assignment, it was time to read. Inmate B sat
up, held his writing pad in front, and adjusted his glasses.
"Forget my name/Forget my face/ Forget my arms/ My strong embrace"
and on and on.
Quartets. Rhyming. Self pity. Ugh.
The rest of the guys in the workshop looked to me. They didn't want to say
anything.
Uncomfortable silence.
I took an indirect path.
"So, what kind of piece is this?"
"A poem," one man volunteered.
"That's right. What kind of poem?"
"A rhyming verse poem," someone else added.
Inmate B seemed satisfied so far.
"What do you guys think about that form?"
"It's good for Hallmark Cards," another inmate offered, almost
apologetically.
"Yes, it's a familiar form for love poems or family occasions, that kind
of thing."
"They are usually too sappy and sentimental," a big black inmate
said.
"And they feel forced. The words get jammed together and take over what
you are trying to say."
Couldn't have said it better.
Inmate B stirred in his chair. I saw his knuckles go white with a strong
squeeze. But he took notes.
The inmates began to offer up sharp observations about inverted structures,
excessive abstraction, lack of sensory details, vividness of image, and general
overload of sentiment.
Inmate B sat still and hard as a stone, except for his pen, which kept moving.
"Anything else?" He said.
"Keep working on it. But try free verse next time," I offered.
I find that free verse elicits more honest emotion, complexity, immediacy,
surprise. It sometimes takes a while to stop wanting to be like and sound like
Shelly or Longfellow and start sounding like one's self. As my running coach
once said, "You can't be anywhere other than where you are, no matter how
much you want might want to be."
Inmate B did not return to the workshop for a couple of months, but when he
did, he brought a story about moonshine in Kentucky, and his conscription into
the family business when he turned eleven. It wasn't perfect, but it resonated
with the smells, sights, and language of the Appalachians. I published a
revised version of the story in the prison magazine.
Since then, he has compiled a book length collection of stories and free verse
poems.
I don't like all of them. I find many of them still bigoted, harsh, and smugly
puerile. Others, however, offer a view into white poverty, closed family
secrets, stunted opportunity, and a seething anger at institutions or
intellectuals.
"I would have gotten mad a few years ago," he said to me recently,
after finding a Post It on one his drafts that said "Low Priority. I don't
much like this piece."
I had written that as directions to the volunteer typist, and she had forgotten
to remove it.
"But now I can take it. I know you eggheads are full of shit." he
smiled, a not completely ironic smile.
"It's true," I said. "I didn't like that piece. It is loaded
with cliche and pointless, irritating meanness."
"But I keep coming back, don't I?"
" Yes you do. Me too" I said, knowing that pronoun was grammatically
wrong, but right for the moment.
Between
the Lines
The life of the mind
is a struggle between competing narratives. And the narratives we create propel
our actions, beliefs, values, and attitudes. These stories are at war. The
stakes could not be higher, because the stories determine the course of lives, of
relationships, of how we live with and on this planet.
We bathe in them, soak them up like dry towels set on a puddle of bath water.
They are everywhere and rain down on us in the form of memories, conversations,
movies, the look in the eye of a lover. We will die for them and we will kill,
steal, trade souls for them.
When a man pulls a gun out in a bank, he is living out the belief that he
should have money, that the need for money outweighs the risk of prison. When a
woman opens her legs for a fee, she is living the story that sex is a commodity
to be traded, no less than a doctor taking a fee for suturing a child's cut
above the eye.
There are stories that tell us life is about survival at all costs, that our
welfare is more important than that of those from whom we steal or exploit. We
see life as a jungle hierarchy. The story becomes a reality.
When I go to prison to run the writing workshops, I know I step into a crucible
of stories. There, race runs the show and power is king. The brutality of prey
and predator sits like a poison cloud over the yard. You survive by playing the
system and the system survives by feeding on the stories of fuck or be fucked.
There are stories that see life as creation, as an evolution beyond executioner
and victim. They come from a place that sees what might be, not just what is.
These stories weave their way into art and literature. They speak from longing,
find ways into songs and poetry.
I know that poetry has a life of its own and that it joins us in the workshop.
The generative force that drives the creation of a new story permeates and
infuses the circle of men. It whispers "You can write a different story,
one that touches the grief and joy without destroying your progress. You can be
more human, more compassionate, empathetic, connected, alive. Your life is a
wonderful piece of clay that you shape out of images and words you have not yet
imagined."
It is a whisper compared to the roar of fear and anger on the yard. But if one
can listen, the voice of possibility responds. It is a living impulse that
cannot be silenced.
Some would call opening such a door a lost cause, would argue that such an airy
pursuit is no match for the fear and carnal appetite of prison, or
day-to-day hustle in this man's America.
Another voice, more elusive, more in this world than of it, would charm rather
than seduce, would whisper rather than shout, and would surprise with a dance
that says, yeah, why not?
Lifting
the Lid on the Social Shadow
When I point my old Subaru south,
the familiar butterflies take wing. I drive toward the tracks, the coal-fired
power plant, and the state prison, where I will meet the writing workshops.
About the time I merge onto the interstate, I get nervous. The reasons are both
trivial and close to a live nerve.
I
am nervous that I will not do a good job running the workshops. That’s the
teacher in me, and my apprehension is well founded. The workshops have been
going on for almost 40 years, and they have a decorated, high profile history.
There is no way I can live up to what Richard Shelton has done with inmate
writing – National Book Awards, Endowment for the Humanities grants and on and
on. But I am a teacher and writer and pay attention to the challenges in front
of me, which loom large as I approach the Arizona State Prison Complex at the
end of Wilmot road.
The
“population” of workshop members is a Rubik’s Cube of ethnic diversity,
previous education, expectations, and attitudes toward writing. It’s a
challenge not unlike a tough English 101 class, but the racial divides and
prison politics, the “shot-callers” and gang affiliations are all there,
waiting at the door when the workshop is over, hanging over the yard like a
poison cloud. I am not totally naïve about the realities of inmate life,
especially in the higher security yards, yet even this is not the core source
of my agitation.
I
am concerned that I have not sufficiently prepared, that I have forgotten to
type or make copies of inmate work, that I am not up to the job of providing
what these men need to improve their writing. I feel some of the same
butterflies on the first day of college writing classes for similar reasons.
All teaching situations require customized planning, whether teaching upper
division non-fiction prose classes, first year developmental writing, or prison
creative writing workshops.
I do not get nervous because I
will soon be sitting in a room with twenty inmates in a medium-high security
unit of the Arizona State Prison Complex, nor because of the sometimes rigid
and byzantine bureaucracy that seems to be forever changing the rules. No, the
nervousness comes from a fear that I will have to meet some of my own demons,
that I will shrink from the harsh facts of inmate stories, that I will fail to
help the men to tell their stories in a way that readers will find compelling
enough to see the human face behind the words.
Yes,
there is more going on here. Prison is more than a place of confined bodies; it
is also, literally and metaphorically, the place of confined, broken, disowned,
and silenced stories. It is no secret that the US has the highest documented
rates of incarceration in the world, and Arizona ranks 6th among the
states at 572 in prison per 100,000 residents. Much has been written about the
social, political, and economic costs of incarceration, but the social
psychology of American incarceration hasn’t received much attention. There is
more even than a kind DSM catalogue of mental illness and how prisons have
become the holding bin for the mentally ill who have no advocates or resources.
There is even a more subtle, more insidious dynamic at work.
Prison
reflects what Carl Jung calls the shadow, that aspect of the psyche to reject
and disown the unpleasant aspects of a whole human. Unpleasant traits like
addictions, poverty, mental illness, violence, racism, ignorance -- the whole
package -- ends up locked away. What is “human” includes as much atrocity as it
does fine art, after all. Jung contends that denying the shadow comes at a
great cost, that vitality decreases in proportion to the energy needed to keep
the shadow at bay. It is worth noting
that he does not argue for acting out the “Mr. Hyde,” aspects of the psyche,
but that full autonomy results only from being aware of what is in the shadow,
how it shows up in fits of anger, sadness, depression, even psychosis. He
argues the “enlightenment does not come imagining figures of light, but my
making the darkness conscious.” He also says that how the mind organizes itself
manifests in social organization and behavior. What goes on inside, in other
words, takes a parallel form outside, in social structure, institutions,
organization.
One might ask, "How does
darkness become conscious?" Good question that. The best way I know is
through story. The disowned elements of the psyche rise to consciousness in
dreams and story. Stories have a way of defusing some of the tension of
repression, freeing that energy for creative work. Making art is another way to
touch the shadow. Inviting inmates to create, and in the process, to access
some of that shadow, is one way to make their presence conscious to the psyche
of the free world, the un-incarcerated.
The
inmates in our prisons are the exiled aspects of the social body, the rejects,
the throw-aways, the denied. Many of the men I work with in prison are there
because they are the left-overs when opportunities ran dry. Society does not
offer everyone the same chances, the same educations, the same encouragement or
preparation. The ones who are left out of the legal avenues to upward
improvement have no choice but to make their own opportunities in underground
systems, black markets, organized gangs, or criminal taking of resources.
If
I am honest with myself, I know that I am no better than they are, and, quite
possibly would have made the same choices given similar situations. Yes, there
are dangerous men in prison, violent sociopaths who should be contained. But
there are others, many others. Non-violent drug offenders usually make it in
the workshops. I know some who claimed they needed to feed a family, so played
the only game open to them; they did what they had to do. Being a product, in
some ways, of my environment and privilege, I know that I did not have to make
some of the choices these men made. Going into the prison reminds me of those
parts of myself that I have not had to feed to survive.
I
have to consider the truth of stories I would rather not hear and that those
stories serve as witness for those unpleasant facts that the free world would
rather ignore. It is my place to raise the questions that will lead to more
effective telling, forms and quality that will result in publication. In many ways,
I am the bad news that stories will have to re-written if they will ever go
beyond the privacy of a festering wound.
The
butterflies settle as I pass through the six electric gates, three ID
checkpoints, and long walk across the open yard to the Programs Building. As
the men enter the room and help to set up the desks and chairs, I find myself
on more familiar ground, talking about language and ideas, the same topics I
address in college writing classes. It is this point of contact, this
negotiation, and how it differs between the prison and the university that I
would like to explore. It’s a good subject, and one that, as a teacher I find
challenging to think about.
When
I first consider the differences in how I approach college classes compared to
the prison workshops, I see more continuity than disconnect. In some ways, in other words, writing is
writing, whether it be a freshman comp class at the university or a creative
writing class in the prison. I am not surprised to eavesdrop on the men in the
workshop at the door to our classroom arguing over the uses and abuses of
profanity or whether explicit violence is necessary to develop a particular
story. Inmates are often less jaded and more passionate about style and content
than my undergraduate students, though both share the interest. All that said,
the contexts and purposes of prison writing workshops and college writing
courses are drastically distinct and require that I tailor methods and
materials to fit the job.
The
biggest difference between my university teaching and the prison workshops is
what one could call the “social and political constructs” within which the
writing happens. Angela Davis coined the term “prison industrial complex” as
way to get a handle on the epidemic increase in incarceration along with the
growth of private, for profit prisons.
Our
prison population is the highest in the world, and part of what leads to
incarceration is illiteracy. Learning to read and write makes it less likely
that one will end up in prison, or, in the case, of already being there, makes
it less likely that an inmate will return. The reasons for decreased recidivism
and literacy are not fully understood, but the relationship has been
documented, and parsing the particulars is beyond the scope of this essay.
As
a teacher, I need to understand the context of the workshops. Inmates don’t get credit, grades, or degrees
for their writing. Inmates come to the workshops for a wide variety of reasons,
sometimes just to get some paper and a pen. More often than not, they bring
some kind of question, something about how to express feelings they cannot
contain, or about how to compose a letter to a judge. Sometimes they come for
the wrong reasons and find better ones as time and writing progresses.
The
prison population, like any other, is diverse and complex. J., for example,
graduated from an Ivy League school before becoming a heroin addict, and C.
dropped out of school in the eighth grade. Yet they see themselves represented
stereotypically in television, film, and advertising as low-lifes, cruel,
mentally deranged, stupid, comically inept. As a result, inmates have
desensitized to criticism, or gotten so thick skinned that they accept it with
much of a struggle. Paradoxically, they tell me the workshops are a place where
they can feel, be more human for a while.
Inmates
write about a world I barely know – one of addiction, homelessness, violence,
prostitution, as well as love, hope, and spiritual life. They patiently explain
terms like “tweaker,” and strategies to stretch food stamps like buying a cheap
item with the stamp and then taking the cash for what they really want. They
have few illusions about clichés like a fair, blind justice system and are
jaded about equal enforcement of laws. Unlike students at the university, I do
not have to persuade inmates that poverty, race, and class all figure in to
opportunities offered.
Consider
the work of J., an addict, an ex-member of the Aryan Brotherhood, he says, and
one of the more serious members of the workshop:
Heroin Cosmology
A flame flickers
Beneath the flimsy white plastic spork
But it does not melt
Into an unrecognizable blob.
Instead, thousands of tiny new planets
Sizzle into existence, pop into extinction
A fresh galaxy of euphoria.
The clear plastic mosquito slurps its fill
And the newest god winces
As the needle-sharp silvery fang punctures.
He begins to pray to Him
To see crimson swirling and congealing
Mixing with dark nirvana, however temporary
It is evidence of true aim.
As the smooth black rubber o-ring rams home
And the white circle of string
Is untied from above a bicep
Eyelids droop, jaws slacken, mysteries are revealed,
And A-H-H!
The vice tightens
Another turn
The grip
Like jaws of a leg-hold
Trap.
J.
grew up in Phoenix, lived on the streets after he dropped out of high school,
an saw no hope of going to college. He was married for a while and has
children. He is an Arizona son who is shrewd enough to see opportunities and
take them.
***
The
physical space of the workshops is decidedly low-tech: no ELMO, LCDs,
connectivity, or even overhead projectors. The workshops operate in the age of
pencil and paper. Regimentation, martial authority, and predatory relationships
pervade the yard. All of this adds up to a “no bullshit” atmosphere. My persona
has to be one that radiates confidence and commitment to what we are doing. I
have to believe in it. I have to have reasons that the inmates understand and
respect for what we do.
Writing
in the workshops is intrinsically motivated. That is, I don’t tell them what to
write about. They choose the subjects, though I do give “assignments” for those
who are stuck. For example, I might ask them to describe an idea or concept as
a character, to personify an abstraction like despair. But I tell them that
they have to do the assignment, or something else that they want to work on.
Most just work on what they want to write about. The work is usually what we
composition people call “expressive” or creative – prose, poetry, and fiction,
or some blend of them.
The
inmates bring a rich well of experience to the workshops, but not always the
technical skills to present that experience in a way that most readers will
find interesting or comprehensible. In order to polish the writing, inmates
must work on language, rhetorical strategies, syntax, form. We talk about
matching the subject to the form best at conveying it. It is heady, hard work.
The “lessons” of “showing, not just telling,” using figurative language, selecting
telling detail, and many others, are all woven into the context of drafting,
revising, editing.
Another
aspect that contributes to motivation lies in the end goal of the workshop:
publication. The Poetry Project is supported by a grant from the Lannan
Foundation that pays for a yearly magazine. For years it was the Walking Rain Review under Richard
Shelton, but now it is Rain Shadow,
part tribute, part description of the meteorology around the prison.
A
literary journal speaks to a wider audience than most of the inmates write for.
They write for each other, and the results are sometimes embarrassing in the
sophomoric, puerile humor, the sexism, the scatological hilarity. When I point
to this, often the only voice who wants improvement, they tell me I would
understand if I were incarcerated. I don’t disagree, and remind them that they
aren’t just writing for other inmates if they want their work published. In
order to publish, they have to move beyond complaining or the easy slap-stick
and find an image or a telling detail or a story with breathing characters
rather than general abstractions. These are the messengers that both speak from
the shadow and to a reader. Energy is exchanged and art is born. This, to me,
is when the writing becomes truly dangerous in making connections between the
free world and that of the prison.
Here
is a poem from B., a long-time member of the workshops who has published
regularly for over ten years.
Cut
From The Will
Though
you knew ---
I
know you knew ---
I
was already stuck outside
In
the rock garden’s far end
Atop
a three-headed saguaro.
So,
why?
I
never could make myself
Eat
a whole crow
But
didn’t I always bring each
Broken
body to the backdoor?
I
know you saw them.
I
left them for you
There
on the limestone stair
With
its unshaped edge and map
Of
dried mildew islands.
I
saved you,
Saved
you from your stone dream:
Brought
you black feathers
Broken
bits of wing and claw.
I
left them --- always --- so
You
could find them
Where
the afternoon shadows
From
the backyard’s single cottonwood
Reach
the door’s sedimentary tread.
Open
up!
You
hear me,
I
know you hear me.
Just
open the damn door. . .
I’m
asking. . .
They
can try to publish anywhere, and they bring in drafts to workshop for science
fiction magazines, travel magazines, literary magazines, and contests like the
Pen America Prison Writing Contest.
In
other words, the workshops are a means to an end of reaching an audience, and
not an abstract audience, but one that might pay for the right to publish.
Given
that the workshops have limited seats and participants that self-select, most
of the inmates want to learn, desperately in cases. They do not carry an
inheritance of entitlement, like many of the undergraduates at the UA, however.
Many come from families that did not expect high levels of literary attainment.
They were not told to go to college, become doctors, lead. Many of the inmates
have been homeless, or addicted, or grown up in abject poverty, or dropped out
of school. In terms of writing, many have trouble with spelling and punctuation
and are not afraid to ask basic questions about nouns, verbs, sentences, or
whether or not it is better to begin with a detail or a broad overview. They
lean in sometimes to ask what a word brought up in discussion means. They want
to participate, learn, to inquire. Sometimes the profundity of the questions,
such as what is a sentence or what makes a paragraph leave me scratching my
head because I don’t know for sure. I can’t define the difference between
poetry and prose other than by vague generalizations. They make me think about
the fundamental functions of language, the role of a sentence as the smallest
unit of story: character and action. They push me to question ways we dramatize
the unspeakable.
Given
that the context, population, physical resources, and motivations of the prison
workshops differ so dramatically from the college writing class, what can a teacher/writer
do? How do I negotiate this difference?
The
first move I make is to meet them where they are, wherever that is. Then it is
time to listen to what it is they need and what the best ways are to offer
that. Some inmates need critique, sometimes sharp critique. Others may need
encouragement, recognition for exploring difficult subjects or experiences.
Sometimes the best thing I can do is listen. Some of them just want to have
their say, to speak their truth, share a hard-won realization. These intangibles
may be the reward of the workshops. Inmates get no direct social promotion for
the workshops, but they can glean some better understanding of themselves by
working on creative pieces.
When
inmates join the workshops, their writing is often overly sentimental and
distressingly abstract. They write, understandably, to daughters, girlfriends,
and mothers in language more appropriate to Hallmark cards than to literary
publication. Or it is confessional, sensational, and graphic, but goes little
further than rendering scenes in distressingly harsh detail. They begin by
recording just experience, to the point where there is only circumstantial
detail, with little or no broader, audience appeal, or larger idea. The next level of writing – which begins with
a deep engagement with the subject – where it begins to examine a theme or
idea, is a big step and depends in part on levels of reading, education,
awareness of a worldview or vision. The
bigger ideas, the context, the overlap with an outside reader’s world seem
unnecessary or unworthy of consideration. The learning curve for these men is
steep. Sometimes, in a matter of months, they write with greater maturity,
precision, and honesty. They hear, in the other men’s work, real effort to
capture experience through well-chosen, independent, fresh, well-earned
language.
They
have to grow beyond embryonic ideas of what good writing is and how much work
it takes to shape and share a complex
thought. I realize that I am talking to myself when talking to them. I
see that what needs to be said in my own life is the hard stuff -- my fears,
anger, and sense of injustice. It takes so much energy to keep that repressed,
bottled up, confined. I have begun that process, but have not finished. There
is work to be done. It begins with invitation, leads to listening, and then
progresses to the craft of shaping for oneself and for a reader. It is one
thing to be heard, another to be understood.
When
I reload the Subaru and head back toward the city, I remember that when I began
to write, I found someone inside myself I did not previously know. The words
led to ideas, strung together an identity, spoke taboos, affirmed beliefs. The
words took on a life of their own when put to paper. They made some of the
darkness conscious. It is the words wrung from darkness that I trust when I go
to the prison or to the classroom. With some respect, skill, and something to
say students and inmates might find a way to save us from ourselves.
Touching the Live Wire
He held no interest in the workshops until he saw Sandra Alcosser, a visiting
poet, walk with me across the yard on our way to the Programs Room. After that
workshop, he hailed me from the other side of the fence separating the sidewalk
from the rec yard, and asked how he could get into the workshop. I told him
what I tell everyone who asks, "Send in a kite." I thought that was
the last I would hear from him. After all, the excitement of seeing a woman
visitor on the yard passes as quickly as a June rain shower.
He did, however, follow up, and soon became the hardest working member of the
workshops. A. is a lyricist at heart. he writes love songs, but he wants to
understand poetry. He devours books I bring in. Laurence Perrine's Sound and
Sense, for example, has long been a classic for university poetry seminars.
It's a semester-long text book that covers theories of poetry, forms, and
itcontains a lifetime's worth of prompts for writing verse.
A. worked through the book and about drowned us all with the wave of paper
filled with his responses to the prompts. He wrote villanelles, pantoums,
haikus, acrostic poems, sonnets. He experimented with form poems, free verse.
He crawled into metaphor, metonymy, meditations, and rants. The guy was on
fire.
His eyes look at me with a gaze I would expect from a bird of prey --
sharp and hungry. His nose is sharp, brow low, cheeks chiseled. There is an
edge to him to makes me a little uncomfortable sometimes. But his passion for
writing gives him charisma of leadership in the workshops. He is unafraid to
speak his mind when critiquing the work of big-shot gangsters.
Beneath the sharp exterior, A. is a man in love with words. He spends hours
revising single lines once he gets to the point where he wants to polish a piece.
And he speaks lucidly about his quandaries between the connotations of one word
or another.
His work looks at complexity, paradox, contradiction. He goes to the heart of
ambivalence. His instincts for tension help him sniff out the stories lurking
in his own work and the work of others. He loves deeply and is angry. That
might fuel some of his insights into conflict.
When, J., a grad student in the MFA program came in to talk about prose poetry,
she brought along copies of J.G. Ballard's poem "What I Believe."
Here A. found a form capable of conveying the range of his vision. Here is a
sample of his work:
Untitled III
I believe in the power of the pen to
bleed onto the page the pains of yesterday, to pollute the bright surface with
audacious ideas laid down as loops and stray marks.
I
believe in painting in words, done by one stroke at a time, to add a little bit
of blue to the natural gray of this dream called life.
I
believe in ideas, abstract as they come, to grab hold of them and smash them to
the concrete, to create and destroy them, to conceive, deceive and make them
bleed, to kill them.
I
believe in reading a novel but once, and to go over a poem over and over, ‘til
each line becomes a novel in itself.
I
believe in making many pictures into one image, in making many lines into one,
in making many words into one, in summing up many ideas into one punch line, in
imagining how much more we can say using one word to convey sentences.
I
believe in observing the unseen, in containing the untamable, in capturing the
wind from the East and keeping it for selfish gain.
I
believe in the daemon that troubled Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the writer, in
that shadow that is the light hidden in the vale of tears, that is the soul, in
the entity that some call evil, but what I call the spring that gushes forth
gold.
I
believe that before Satan was cast out, he robbed the treasury of heaven, and
now showers those who will listen with rubies from the Holy of Holies, the
secrets of the dream of life itself.
I
believe that the mysteries of life aren’t mysteries at all, but are the things
we know the most of, the things that scream at us to only look within, into the
mirror inside us that reflects true being, the demon within.
I
believe in the blunt talk, how oxymoronic it is when it cuts with machete-like
words, hacking to the heart.
I
believe in putting notes to words, in giving voice to the heart, in giving
color to the soul, and hope to the young.
I
believe in not holding Death at arm’s length, in not trying to avoid paying
one’s debt to nature, in not running from tomorrow.
I
believe in illegality, in being tabooish in order to be crowned with the regal
headband of Alexander the Great, in crossing moral borders, climbing the Great
Wall in order to be Genghis Khan and trample into dust the so-called chosen, in
breaking the law, in being part of the 1%, the rich and outlaws, giving it
100%, and schooling the street 1·0·1,
all in order to be the Don Apollyon.
(Apollonian? Napoleon?)
I
believe in being unconventional, in untying one’s hand and foot, in being
unconstrained, freewheeling my free will down the great road, in being unstuck,
shaking the mud off my boots in order to stomp and get blood on them.
I
believe in being contradictory, in being contradistinctive, in being the
contrarian, surpassing the norm, antagonizing the average, directly contrasting
a constellation to a planet, putting to shame the prevailing wisdom of the age.
I
believe in Jesus and Darwin, in Muhammad and Krishna, in Buddha and Confucius,
in the Aztecs and Spaniards; take a little here and a little there, puree and
drink up the mixed blood of my ancestors.
I
believe in the sad eyes that hide a happy heart.
I
believe in being honest, in not lying, but honestly telling you nothing, in
being truthful, and the truth is this; silence is the ultimate truth, in being
sincere; I sincerely do not apologize.
I
believe in being passive aggressive; you can laugh now; I’ll just wait ‘til no
one is watching.
I
believe in being aggressive; sometimes there won’t be a next time.
I
believe in keeping score.
I
believe in the rose, the petals and thorns of life, in the one apple a day, and
in that one apple from that one day, he must have eaten the arsenical seed that
took root in his loins and poisoned the seed of man.
I
believe in names, if we only lived up to them; in titles, if we only honored
them; in handles, if we only grabbed hold of them.
I
believe in the deus
ex machina, in the Godsend, in the Jesus of the story, in the eagle perched
upon the nopal cactus devouring the serpent, in the father of my daughters.
I
believe in changing with the times, in if you live by the sword, you will die
by the gun, in giving up your dreams of a better tomorrow for a better tomorrow.
I
believe in holding on, only to let go; in capturing the hummingbird, only to
let it fly once more; in catching the white whale and releasing it back into
the deep; in getting the girl, only to leave her in the morning.
Connections
The Greeks believed
there existed a "spirit" of poetry. This spirit would sometimes visit
a human and deliver what was needed to compose a work of art, a thing of truth
and insight, a thing, as my friend Tom says, of beauty.
This spirit did not care a whit for social class, wealth, achievement, power,
or pride. In fact, too much ego or pride would send the muse packing. It
sometimes visited the humblest of places and people, but did not easily find
its way to the page.
Drudgery, lack of education or literacy, want of materials or physical
restraint all kept the words from record. The genius was there, but the images,
ideas, and language languished.
The spirit moved on.
When the poetry of the outsiders did make it to a song or a memory or a
tradition, it did not meet with much welcome by the powers that be. Stories
that exposed greed, exploitation, grotesque sides of humanity fell on the point
of a spear.
But the poets persevered, often in obscurity. Women, like Hildegard of Bingen,
Sapphos, Antigone and more contemporary writers like Jack London and Theodore
Dreiser all looked to the realities of social hypocrisy rather than deliver
genial, titillating little bon-bons and back slapping for the elites.
And so it goes still. The muses come with me to the prison, not because of me,
of course, but because there are hearts waiting and opening with the prospect
of telling a truth well. There exists, sometimes, a quantum shift of energy
change when the efforts blend, merge, and weave into a synergy of communion and
connection with something much bigger than the individuals in the circle.
Often, when a new man comes in, it takes a while for the respect of words to
gel enough for synergy to generate. The other men are patient and lend their
wisdom. That either works or it doesn't, depending on the willingness of the
new guy.
When I despair that the work I have done in obscurity has come to nothing in
the way of publication or promotion, I think of the ocean, of the mountain.
They are made up of small drops and stones. There are forces at work that add
up to the impression of eternity and infinity. The small, necessary component
pieces become more than the sum of their parts.
It is like that with any creative work done for the sake of itself, but that
might feel wasted or isolated.
As long as it is done with care, the work reaches out, its tendrils eager to
grasp onto the work of others. The creative contributions, in increments,
organize into a critical mass of desire.
It then wanders the corridors of the mean places and knocks quietly on doors,
inviting to dance the words that might chip away at the fearful dream that we
are alone, that might help us see our deepest selves in the words of others.
Fairy Tales Sometimes Happen
Once upon a time, a young man made some mistakes and had to go to jail. While
he was in jail, he thought about these mistakes, about how others had tried to
help him, and he decided not to do stupid, mean things anymore.
One day, he saw some other men sitting in a circle and talking about how they
saw the world. They talked in ways that helped them tell stories about their
lives, what they had seen, felt, and learned.
The young man sat down and listened for a long time. Then he spoke up and told
some of his own stories.
In one story, a true one, he was homeless. All he had were some old clothes and
a skateboard. He loved that skateboard and learned how to do tricks with it. In
fact, the only times he felt happy were when he was working on tricks and doing
them better and better.
He was all alone on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona, in the summertime one day,
practicing his tricks. On this day he was sad and angry because people had been
mean to him. He was trying to get rid of his anger by working really hard on
his tricks, doing them better and better, until he worked so hard his
skateboard broke.
It seemed like the whole world was against him.
But, when he went to a skateboard store, the owner saw that he had no money and
a big need for a new skateboard, so he gave the young man one.
The young man did not know how to thank him, but tried to help other people for
a while. He did this as long as he remembered that someone had been kind to
him. His tricks got better and better. But then he forgot and made the mistakes
that put him in jail.
The men in the circle liked the story, and someone later retold the story on
the radio.
A film maker heard the story and decided to make it into a movie.
On the same day that the filming began, the young man got out of jail.
Other people heard the story and wanted to help tell the story again and again.
The young man was paid for the story and a newspaper wanted to interview him.
That movie is being filmed right now in Tucson.
It will tell the story of kindness and what kindness can do to change things.
Many people, especially young people, will see the movie. The young man is
happy and grateful.
This story is not over. It keeps going. There is a kind of magic that brings
people together to warm their hands around the fire made by telling this story.
Some say it has lit a candle in cold, lonely hearts. Some say it walks at
night, in alleys, downtown, disguised as a smiling custodian, or under the
moon, as a singing coyote.
This story lives.
