The Prison Reading That Humbled Me
I came to teach poetry; the men inside already lived it deeper.
I brought forty photocopies and a lesson plan on imagery into a state prison, and I left eight weeks later with my entire understanding of writing quietly corrected.
The volunteer coordinator, a tired saint named Denise, warned me in the parking lot. "They will be better than you expect," she said. I nodded the way you nod at things you believe in theory. I had published a book. I had spent years in workshops and courses, a whole apprenticeship of learning to write in rooms with good lighting and bad coffee. I assumed I was bringing something in... It did not occur to me that I might be the one receiving.
When people hear about teaching writing in prison, they picture one of two movies. Either the hardened men who scoff at poetry until a breakthrough scene, or the saintly teacher who saves souls with a whiteboard. Week one destroyed both scripts inside of ten minutes.
Twelve men signed up. They filed into the multipurpose room, which smelled like floor wax and old announcements, and before I had finished my introduction a man named Wallace, sixties, glasses repaired with tape at the exact center, raised his hand and asked, "You publish under your own name or you use a pen name because of family?"
Not a question I had ever been asked at a literary festival.
A question with an entire life inside it.
I had planned to ease them in. I had brought a prompt I considered gentle: write about a window. In the workshops I knew, that prompt produced rain, nostalgia, a moderate amount of longing, safe poems all around.
Rey went first. Twenty-eight, forearms like dock rope, a whisper for a reading voice. His window was the window of the transport bus that brought him in nine years ago. He wrote that the glass had a wire mesh inside it, diamond shapes, and that the city he grew up in came apart into diamonds as it left him: his block in diamonds, his school in diamonds, a woman on a corner wearing his mother's coat... diamond by diamond by diamond.
The last line said the bus had no rearview mirror, and that he had spent nine years being one.
I sat there holding my pen like a fork at the wrong dinner.
In my workshops, that would have been the best poem of the year, and its author would have been careful to seem modest about it for a full semester. Rey folded the page into quarters and asked, no irony anywhere, "Is that what you meant by imagery?"
Every week broke me a little further open.
Marcus wrote about the vending machine in the visiting room, how he memorized which row his daughter's candy was in, B4, and how a man measures a year in B4s.
A man they called Professor wrote about the exact sound of count time at 4 a.m., and got into a serious craft argument with Wallace about whether the sound was closer to a church bell or a hammer, an argument conducted with more precision than any workshop debate I have ever moderated, because both men had heard that sound more than three thousand times and considered accuracy a form of respect.
My turn came in week five. They insisted. I read the best poem from my book, the one that closed readings, the one reviewers had called unflinching. It was about my father's temper, and about the years I spent not speaking to him, and it ended on an image I was proud of, his hands gone soft in a hospital bed.
They listened the way they wrote... completely.
Then Wallace took off his taped glasses, cleaned them on his shirt, and delivered the sentence I have been carrying ever since.
Out there you write to be remembered. In here we write to remember. It is not the same sport.
He was not being cruel. He explained it patiently, like a man giving directions to someone from out of town. My poem, he said, was written for an audience, shaped to land, angled to be admired. Their poems had no audience worth flattering. A poem in there is a rope thrown backward to a self that is otherwise gone: a mother's kitchen, a block, a daughter growing up in photographs. If the details are wrong, the rope does not hold.
"You unflinched for the crowd," Wallace said, tapping my photocopy. "Question is what your father's hands looked like before the hospital. That part you flinched."
He was right.
There was no earlier version of those hands anywhere in my poem. I had written my father dying because dying is dramatic, and skipped my father living because living was complicated, and some part of me had known it and called the omission craft.
The final week was the reading... No families, no press. Folding chairs, a podium nobody used, correctional staff along the wall, and Denise in the front row with the face of a woman at her kid's graduation. Twelve men read. Marcus read the vending machine poem and a guard everyone was afraid of blinked hard and studied the ceiling like it owed him money.
Rey read a new piece, one he had worked on for a month, about his mother, and about the phone call he had been rehearsing for nine years and never placed, a poem circling forgiveness the way you circle a house you used to live in, not sure you are allowed on the porch.
After the reading, Rey asked me to mail the poem to her. Approved, stamped... sent.
Denise told me later that his mother wrote back within a week, and that the letter began, "I have been rehearsing too."
I drove home that night on an empty highway and had to pull over at one point, under a streetlight in a closed gas station, because I could not see the road well enough through whatever was happening to me. I sat there in the cone of orange light and understood that I had walked in believing poetry was a skill I possessed, portable, teachable, mine. Eight weeks of men with everything stripped away had shown me it is closer to a survival behavior. Language is what remains when they take your belt, your laces, your name for a number.
You cannot teach anyone that. You can only bring paper, and get out of the way.
I still teach the workshop. Different men now, mostly. Wallace was released last spring. He sends me his poems by mail, handwriting like barbed wire relaxing, and he signs every letter the same way, a joke and not a joke:
"Keep practicing. You have potential."
I keep every one under the streetlight of my desk lamp, and I write him back the truth: I am trying to learn the other sport.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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