Hello! This is the occasional newsletter Working Knowledge. If you didn’t mean to be here, you’ll be able to unsubscribe below. Your thoughts welcome. Greetings from Cleveland Heights. —HP
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Notes on Specificity / The Fifth Largest City is Hell
We met in the prison library. With its cheesy murals (Hemingway’s face?), computers trimmed with bright pink—theft deterrent, I guess. The scene of teaching in prison is constrained and overdetermined, to discuss it risks cliché, that noble activity about you who are doing it more than those there. It’s The Wire and we’re talking Great Gatsby, those Eggs. What was remarkable about the library scene was its quality of casualness: how open the form of the meeting felt, how people tried ways to be there openly together. C, a professor in social sciences at a nearby university, had invited me—he and others had founded the program, a writing workshop for those incarcerated in Northeast Ohio, underway at a couple men’s facilities. He said he was looking for writing teachers because he’d been running the workshop for years but, he laughed, he didn’t know anything about poetry or teaching writing. Though of course he did, very much, since he’d been doing that work, and the guys were there, writing and meeting together, their work appearing in years of chapbooks and at readings in the outside world, the potent creation and sharing of so many poems, stories, essays, the generous inclusion of other students and writers who wished to join in and be there.
When you’re in a prison but not imprisoned, you know you’re there to learn. You are visiting America’s fifth-largest city (after Houston, before Phoenix): our population of the incarcerated. For you it may be hard to get there, easy to leave, and hard how easy it is to be there, in good conversation whose structure is profoundly unequal—you are free, every time, to just go.
To get there you drive over an hour out of metropolitan Cleveland into a small town on the big lake. If anyone inside is from Cleveland, it’s hard for their family to visit. The highway follows the lakeshore but you can’t see the water, though there may be a flock of seagulls, settling, rising, through the fog over a stretch of farmland. Get off at the exit, turn down Liberty Street, and perceive the strategy: this town badly needs jobs and the prison is jobs. Prisons are institutions for the prevention of solidarity, violently dividing working-class people employed there (here, largely white) from poor and working-class people imprisoned there (here, largely Black). Everything about the situation, prisoner and guard, those who can leave and those who cannot, is structured to enforce opposition and oppression, racist oppression. Walls are built to exclude everyday feelings and practices of commonality, forms of recognition. You have to go through a training in order to work regularly as a volunteer and its language is a perfect model of us vs. them. They are inmates. They are not referred to otherwise, for example with the word people. Nowhere is the division between citizen and inmate more important than in the prison, where people are so close they may relate. The institution works violently hard to obstruct informality, spontaneous togetherness, casual mutuality, impulsive humanity, natural compassion, any form that’s yours, that’s ours.
In the writing workshop, everyone is asked to read something together for the first time, to respond spontaneously, to roll pencils across the big middle of the pushed-together tables, to lean far in to grab the one that gets stuck, to write in silence for a few minutes together, sound of pen and paper, then share, reading right off the page, sometimes someone whose page is still blank will say, I don’t know how he came up with all that just now… Others knew more about being there—why and how the group existed, the situations of the guys in it, who was getting out soon, what people wanted from this program—but when it was someone else’s day to lead, for instance mine, C always just handed the time to me generously, enthusiastically, like it was my space too and people trusted whatever I’d try. So I felt the sense of welcome and inclusion I’d want any student to feel. I want people to feel it because I know how it felt. Someone shares their work and their work is listened to, appreciated. Thank you for sharing. You say it casually because it’s big. It’s big because it just actually happened.
Since the start of the pandemic we can’t meet. Can’t go there. So many programs in prisons got shut down, so much of visitation prohibited, so many new restrictions inflicted. So many incarcerated people suffering or lost to covid. No social distancing at so many facilities because too many people are incarcerated—what are you going to do, let people out? Men here were told (they reported, asking for help) to hang towels up every three feet in their cells, as barriers to covid, and to sleep with their heads at opposite ends of their bunks. None of this would in any way prevent infection. Later the towels got punitively torn down. Even your farcical symbol of protection will be denied.
As pandemic alternative, the writing group set up a mentorship program to run via correspondence, pairing writers inside and outside. After six or seven months that program hit a wall, too, had to be paused. So far, of every education/social justice/literacy/poetry/books-through-bars program for the incarcerated I’ve been involved in, none have been allowed to simply go on. To continue uninterrupted, in their working form. For some reason. There’s always a new factor, policy, set of regulations, a new emergency that takes precedence, needs more enforcement. The reasons don’t have to be reasonable. You used to able to send mail into prisons; now increasingly the prison destroys your mail and sends a (bad) photocopy instead, making sure to scan everything anyone writes, an endless record they’ll keep and use. You send someone books to read during the pandemic shutdown, but because you didn’t buy the books from Amazon.com, they will be destroyed, or the inmate will be personally charged to return them to you (under no circumstances will the inmate receive the books). Write a note to someone inside, maybe someone lacking friends and family these days, tell him you can’t write him anymore, not for a while, there’s a new rule. Good luck.
I haven’t been doing this long enough, but I’m starting to get that if you want to build any connection from the outside to the inside of the prison, there’ll always be a new obstruction, asking for a new form of invention, another evolution we’ll need to stay human.
“A bedrock principle of the prison abolitionist movement is that you don’t ask an incarcerated person what they’re in for. It’s more than etiquette,” Judith Levine writes in a recent article in the Intercept. Women who teach in prison may notice how often staff stresses to them that the guys they’re working with are “really bad guys.” The writing group is a place where someone’s interactions, who they are, what they’re saying, how their writing is read, aren’t determined by the specifics of their one crime, the formal condemnation of their conviction. You know the crime exists—or at least the conviction does—but at the table in the library, the specifics aren’t there, so the crime and its potential meanings are suspended. Levine describes this decision—not to identify people in the terms “that the punitive state assigns”—as a means “to see someone whole.” At first that phrase struck me as wrong; you were seeing someone in part, deliberately, excluding a significant part of their story as an act of compassion and greater inclusion. But maybe to see someone whole means not to see someone as whole but to see someone into wholeness, beyond their and your partiality, how a conviction is wrought to exclude us from sharing humanity, from life together in the cities of living.
The occasion of this article in the Intercept was a controversy you may recall, when Poetry magazine published its February 2021 issue, “The Practice of Freedom,” which featured the work of writers who have experienced incarceration alongside others writing on that subject (teachers, scholars, activists). The issue’s guest editors read submissions with the idea that “poets are not members of the jury,” as editor Tara Betts expressed, and they did not request or seek out information on writers’ convictions. The controversy, then, was that the issue included work by a former professor of literature and previously published author who had served time for possession of child pornography and was on the sex offender registry. This fact eclipsed the other work in the journal; it inspired articles in international media, a petition in protest, and social media activism by members of the literary community who contested this man’s inclusion, citing the decision’s painful disregard for survivors of child abuse. All this made the issue much more famous than it would have been, but his poem became the only poem in the journal, and his inclusion became the central meaning of this archive of writing from and of mass incarceration. Though I don’t know how many readers, writers, critics would even have engaged with the issue in the first place, without some scandal to draw attention. (Poetry, with its foundation’s $250 million endowment, is the richest literary magazine in America, and I could barely get a copy of this issue. They took several months to fulfill my order, got it wrong, and it arrived damaged. Does Poetry exist to be published in, to be talked about, to confer prestige, but not to be read?)
Guest editor Joshua Bennett describes this issue as “about what the literary world owes to the incarcerated.” The literary world’s public response was largely negative. Did it (we) think we owed something less, something other, than what this writing asked?
At the end of the article in the Intercept, C is quoted: “[C] and his colleagues have found that ‘humanizing poems’ by incarcerated people reduce stigma and increase support for post-prison reentry programs. Poetry that evinces ‘universal truths, emotions, experiences of losing, loving,’ he told me, ‘reminds us the writer is, like us, a person.’” The slogan across the Northeast Ohio program’s website says simply: “We are human. We write.” Poetry makes humanizing happen. If the aim of Poetry’s special issue was to offer testimony about systems and experiences of incarceration, that testimony could come from anyone incarcerated; someone with prior experience as a writer might be particularly able to offer it. What’s more, Levine emphasizes, those on the sex offender registry experience “punishment and exclusion so thorough and permanent that its effect has been called ‘social death.’” If we are to continue condemning people to this social death, we have an obligation to know what it’s like.
But of course, poetry is not testimony. Poetry becomes poetry through its freedom not to testify. It is in the specificity of poetry’s possibilities—not to fulfill an established social or legal or journalistic purpose; not to be what is desired by readers in East, West, or No Egg; not to serve as discursive currency; to speak lyrically and not civically; to inhabit ambiguities and indeterminate states of feeling and meaning; to mean privately not publicly; to explore language’s potential and forms of meaning that cannot be summarized, paraphrased, or commodified—that it realizes its power.
I’m about halfway through reading this issue of Poetry. It offers an intensity of vision and of loss. These poems remember what the poet used to look like, how others saw him and judged him; they remember the friend they were imprisoned with, now dead, “a ghost over the boiler” who “couldn’t take the heat” (Darrell B. Grayson). These poems remember the outside world from the inside, “& all those avenues & streets compose a music / of endless search that trickles down like rain / upon the edge of our world & its religion / of warm flesh” (Justin Rovillos Monson). They “cherish the buzzards, turkeys, geese […] and rock doves”; they “see spiders sparring / at different levels in the windowsill. / […] Even after 4 decades in prison / not one day goes by / Without me hating myself / for the life I took” (Spoon Jackson). They see “Fog against the prison fence” (T.L. Perez). They remember the mobile home park of childhood and “dream / of a terrible storm” (David A. Pickett). They tell us they come from “bottle shards / that scarred my arches” (George T. Wilkerson).
When I read about this controversy I assumed I too would have included this man’s poem, not asking about his conviction, followed the same editorial process. I agreed with the great poet Reginald Dwayne Betts’s (no relation to Tara Betts) expressed frustration with how all this outcry exposed “the limits of abolitionist rhetoric”—“Cause, the same people saying abolition one minute and crying foul the next.” Yet in another article, Betts too offers critiques of the issue and its “blind” submission process, how that process privileges ideas of “good” poetry and excludes many writers (the writer in question has a PhD, after all, not typical of incarcerated writers, but pretty common among those published in Poetry). Betts says: “Poetry already privileges access and opportunity. Blind submission? It’s gonna privilege folks that have more access to that skill development, whether it’s an MFA or a prison program.” He goes on: “I think that we don’t get rid of our issues of incarceration by allowing people not to name the crimes that they committed… We deal with those issues by being really thoughtful about the crimes they’ve committed.”
Thoughtfulness needs and is specificity. As a teacher of writing anywhere your work lives in vacillations between the greater aims and methods of the humanities and this one immediate text—right here, ready for multiplicities of interpretation, whether published in a journal like Poetry or written in the last ten minutes. I never had one minute of patience for a fellow teacher who used to ask of each creative writing class, anyone good?—this ready sorting into hierarchy. If the focus is on the practice of writing, then the old oppressive hierarches of what’s produced are momentarily powerfully suspended. Though the text always arrives again because the practice takes form in the text. The poem is good because it is a poem someone worked to write; yet the meaning of that work beautifully complexly lies in their specific choices, engaged by specific readings. The poem means humanity; yet this greater meaning is realized through the particulars of its writing. Poems are equally good as poems—they all work!—and yet their work is different. They’re asking different things of their readers. They don’t leave you the same. Sometimes people talk about their crimes, their convictions. This openness is a hard grace and humility in which you are being included. Sometimes what someone says isn’t what—you can only now realize—you were hoping. Once after a moment like this, in which I wasn’t sure how to respond to what someone said about this defining event, wasn’t sure how to relate to my own judgment, I talked to a friend. He thoughtfully said: maybe X is failing to own up to his actions when he says that. But maybe whatever he’s saying is just a way of saying I live in hell.
The challenges of life together are endlessly specific. What do we owe each other? We’ll need to keep inventing new forms, to know something new today, to open the new door in the new wall, a problem poetry is good for. We are human: we write. When we talk about prison abolition, Joshua Bennett writes, “we are necessarily also talking about the abolition of everyday carceral practices on the outside… carceral ways of speaking, teaching, and relating to one another.” For 1.7 million people, this hell is specifically endlessly personal. Thoughtfully, specifically, we may be asked to open each gate of hell.
Recommended: Poetry 217, no, 5, “The Practice of Freedom” (February 2021). Reginald Dwayne Betts, Shahid Reads His Own Palm and Bastards of the Reagan Era. Emily Abendroth, Sousveillance Pageant.
"If we are to continue condemning people to this social death, we have an obligation to know what it’s like." never read a truer sentence. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3