Molding a cry & a song
Klein, Rosemary
MOLDING A CRY & A SONG AMERICAN PRISONERS AS POETS Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death . . . Czeslaw...
...Bruchac brought his Light to a book fair in Minneapolis, where he told an audience of poets-at-large what one of his students had said after their second class: "You know, when I'm writing, I'm not in prison...
...an obsolete habitual abuser of needles and hard drugs, and today I am a very sober convict inspecting a new dawn: I've been into creative writing a year and a half...
...Outside, the sign of welcome is only WE COME...
...And then he gets down to cases: I showed you my first poem ever written, 'They Only Came To See the Zoo' But you didn't treat me like a wild ape, "The very design of imagination is to domesticate us in another, a celestial nature," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, back in the early days of (white) American literature...
...But the real genius of The Light from Another Country is something else...
...Charles Press (Minn...
...So, instead of painstaking labor over my grammar and punctuation, I threw them to the wind, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote," explains Baca, who found himself a poet at Arizona State Penitentiary: Now...
...From the darkest corner of our society, their words come shining...
...They were dipped in great vats, coated with primer, set in place with torches then sprayed with institutional green...
...We just sit there neither one speaking...
...After the first workshop, I was hooked: poems began disappearing one by one from the notebook, and gradually newer ones took their place...
...The authors of Light represent a variety of sexes, races, landscapes, hungers, and histories...
...Stronger, to my modern ears, is the language of Michael Knoll...
...He never looks at me Just keeps staring out over the lake, watching, waiting, for something the ducks swim by splashing, quacking the birds dart here and there singing songs to one another, And people on the far side of the lake laughing, joking, skipping rocks over the water I get up to leave It was nice to see you, Grandfather I will come back tomorrow...
...Maloney writes in "City Jail": A black guard motions me into an airway full of pipes and conduits - He wants me to take my clothes off they always want you to take your clothes off I think it gives them the advantage puts you in your place...
...Her poems and stories have appeared in Peninsula Review and Great River Review...
...Literature lies in how we deal with our knowledge, as Paul David Ashley, who died in the Arizona State Prison in 1975, put it in his poem "Beauty": even among the deformed there is a certain beauty: in the hand of an amputee rising to ward off a blow The Light from Another Country contains several dazzling poems, such as James Lewisohn's "The Blind Man," which begins: The street comes to him from the cane, or J.J...
...sions into poetry began when Richard Shelton walked into the Arizona Correctional Training Facility, wearing his blue work shirt and grey felt hat," writes prison poet W.M...
...It is intriguing to think how that happened...
...in this story there's always the possibility of morning, a chance that the screams which drip down at midnight are not really threatening but wishing us well, wishing us a life in another story...
...Such is the vision of Jose Y. Teran, Jr., also at Arizona State Prison...
...It reconfirms our famed infatuation with technology and, against all odds, tentatively dreams the American Dream: I was born in a small adobe apartment rented by my father for my mother in May of 1945.1 experienced the first breath of life in a barrio called El Barrio Libre in South Tucson, Arizona...
...Maloney's "The Prison Guard": Day after day after day he trudges to work with a mouthful of cobwebs...
...Poetry risks so much...
...Yet people in prison choose to take that risk...
...His first novel, I Speak for the Dead (Andrews & McMeel), appeared in 1982...
...In other words, they come from the assorted American"cells'' which the rest of us share...
...I want to ask him How he is doing, but I already know the answer...
...You treated me like Jimmy...
...And we will talk of the old days again...
...Motherhood is big in this America, but apple pie seems to be missing: In the sad cafes that are our lives every jukebox plays the same song...
...She offers us fishcakes and honey that taste like nothing...
...I am a Vietnam War Survivor, my life delayed my soul suspended somewhere near the South China Sea...
...Late, late at night when the walls have cooled, it is all I can do to resist the urge to search in the darkness beneath my bunk where there could be a mushroom, pale and mysterious, growing out of the concrete floor...
...The audience fired salvos of ROSEMARY KLEIN is a free-lance writer and the former editor of the St...
...I heard a prison guard brag about shooting a kid in Viet Nam, booby trapping the body, and watching the kid's family blown apart, laughing) He needs Charlie What takes you by surprise is the tenderness, as in Dennis Shady's "Moose Lake State Hospital": I would like to visit my Grandfather I tell the nurse at the desk...
...MOLDING A CRY & A SONG AMERICAN PRISONERS AS POETS Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death . . . Czeslaw Milosz The Captive Mind The Light from Another Country: Poetry from American Prisons contains the work of sixty prison poets with a few words of biography about each one...
...A mass of molten fury in this furnace of steel, and yet, my thoughts became ladles, sifting carefully through my life, the pain and endurance, to the essence of my being...
...As Edgar Jackson-Anawrok writes from Fairbanks, Alaska: I am Edgar, an Eskimo a lonely hunter no less a man - My brown skin, scarred has felt the biting wind entering my soul scattering the hate, self-pity - my pride into a common language the language I'm learning to speak to trust - I can look back not in anger or hate but with respect for my people myself for believing in our traditions accepting the changes as the world passes into confusion as we pass in silence towards freedom - the freedom of choice . Freedom, incarceration, and communication are three of the themes you naturally expect to find in such a book...
...Now that I am ashore, I find myself building another boat, this time taking time to polish and secure the boat that carries the cargo of my life, fruit, land, babies, a good woman and home, the sun and moon, friends, across the land...
...ROSEMARY KLEIN applause...
...He mentions prison poet Charles Schmidt who, "after finding poetry...
...that you know something about America which Teran somehow has overlooked...
...the "country" may be prison, but the light is the grace of God, communicated in the usual incognito: "My first true excuror an elephant...
...I hear his sobs feel them through steel and tell him, "It'll be alright - it'll be alright tomorrow...
...Over against the casual monstrosity of prison routine, humankindness asserts its frailty: The trouble was a black man crying next to me, our doors slammed shut and locked...
...I feel hatred inside, having to ask to see him...
...The tables are carved with the names of our fathers...
...an ex-marine...
...I hope to earn a serious career as a writer and translator of poetry...
...Of course poet Philip Brasfield, serving a life sentence in Texas, knows it won't be all right tomorrow...
...from "An Overture") The irony of the title: The Light from Another Country is that it's not another country these poets are writing about, but America - an America for the most part unexpressed in poetry until now (for language is a kind of power): "hey C-9758" "what" "are you in there" "yeah i'm in here" "ok" "Without the poems, I have nothing to say," says Daniel L. Klauck, number C-9758 at the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh, author of "Visits": for seven years my mother has been visiting me faithfully each week they stop her at the front gate empty her purse "what's this" "lipstick sir" "and this" "cigarettes for my son officer" "well open 'em up" "yes sir" "you sure there ain't no marijuana in 'em" "i'm sure sir" "better not be lady or you're in big trouble now get that junk the hell outta here...
...What happens on paper is the outward sign of an inward grace, as Jimmy Santiago Baca describes the process in "It Started": : . . . A poetry workshop, an epicenter of originality, companionship, pain and openness, For some, the first time in their life writing, for others the first time saying openly what they felt, the first time finding something in themselves, worthwhile, ugly and beautiful...
...according to Robert B. Smith, "brought to the Arizona State Prison in 1967, at the age of nineteen, and the authorities were so taken with me that they've kept me here ever since'' - this by way of explanation, in case his memory for detail seems inordinately stark...
...Through people like Joseph Bruchac, editor of the anthology (Greenfield Review Press, 1984), poet and a teacher of creative writing "on the outside.'' Bruchac made it his business to "liberate" people behind bars through the art form he knew best...
...J.J...
...and/or that this literature is taking hold - you not only appreciate the odds he's up against, but want him to succeed...
...How do prisoners like Baca get involved with poetry...
...The waitress has clicking eyes...
...Have there been, I wonder, little people chipping away at the paint, oxidizing the metal with damp diminutive hands...
...Because, through the power of the word, he and the others have unlocked the invisible cell, making themselves real to you...
...Prisoners die from openness and courage...
...Less than a decade ago they were forged of the finest tempered steel...
...When a man is drowning, he does not wonder if the decks are polished enough...
...I am a Chicano, a veteran of the American motion: I love the smell of fuel, scorched smoke when slicks burn-out, the deep voice of three deuce carbs sucking the world down narrow throats, the magic of engines whining-out at quarter mile drag strips, the beat of the sixties, Drive-in movies, and the infinite vibration the eternal pulse of our Universe...
...If you fear for his chances, it may mean that you don't really believe in miracles...
...I am taking time with my poems and am careful of punctuation and grammar...
...Toughness you expect, as in Raymond Thompson's poem, "Who Needs Charlie Manson...
...And who was Jimmy...
...But, then, we all know that...
...Now they're rusted...
...Bruchac quotes from Mike Hogan's poem about Schmidt: "He was killed because he forgot fear...
...Poetry in prison served as a chunk of driftwood I clung to...
...Maloney dedicates his poetry to Menn, "that good and unusual man," who died in 1979...
...Maloney discovered poetry while serving a life term in the Missouri State Penitentiary...
...I didn't know how to read or write very well...
...at the visiting booth "hi mom how are ya" "i'm fine honey how are you" "oh i'm ok they didn't give you any trouble coming in did they" "no none at all son they're always very courteous...
...He simply survives, or tries to, with what he can...
...The walls tremble behind their paint like old men in new suits...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Christian Century...
...I find myself, at times, waking up at night and thinking about the result that kind of increased sensitivity may have on those who are still locked inside...
...Naked I stand in a small wind my face a concrete mask molded by years of experience He tells me to spread the cheeks of my ass and bend over then he takes a flyspray can and sprays me with disinfectant the same for the genitals...
...On the bright side, and on its own terms, this American literature upholds the principle of the melting pot (no shortage of blacks and Hispanics here...
...Borrowing the words of prison poet Michael Knoll: Something in the darkness has given birth to a sky spinning with a fierce impossible light...
...If that sounds like Genesis - or Science 101 - no wonder...
...I gently, into the long night, unmolding my shielded heart, the fierce figures of war and loss, I remolding them, my despair and anger into a cry and song, I took the path alone, nuded myself to my own caged animals, and learned their tongues and their spirits, and roamed the desert, went to my place of birth . . . Now tonight, I am a burning bush, my bones a grill of fire, I burn these words in praise, of our meeting, our friendship...
...Who had ever said it so well, for all of them...
...Out on parole, encouraged by Thorpe Menn, book editor of the Kansas City Star, Maloney became a reporter for The Star and a welcome contributor to the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the St...
...What comes as a surprise is the freshness of insight and expression - generally so different from the poetry of amateurs outside of prison...
...Bruchac writes: There is a great deal of openness and courage in the poems in this anthology...
...changed his name, changed his whole way of living in prison" and "was stabbed to death by inmates who still remembered the old scores he was trying to forget...
...In turn, I carried to the workshop a fat black notebook filled with doggerel of the worst sort: "the cold iron bars, plus a missing woman, equals loneliness and heart wreckage" etc., etc...
...While no single poet's experience is "typical," Jimmy Santiago Baca's is illustrative...
...her teeth are the bones of all things dead...
...Consider, for example, these lines by Michael Hogan, convicted of robbery and forgery of Supreme Court documents: The bars on my cell have rusted...
...Aberg: He carried with him a worn leather bag, stuffed with books, magazines, and various periodicals, most of which I had never heard of before...
...For what it's worth, editor Joseph Bruchac shares your feelings, in his "Foreword...
Vol. 115 • January 1988 • No. 1
