Thanks so much for your comment, especially letting me know that my attempt to describe Wright and Luster’s work makes you want to buy the book. That’s very gratifying to hear. I like what you say, as well, about the vernacular. It’s a big issue, and I could (or you could, perhaps) expand on exactly what the term mean to us today. I suspect you’re right, that attempts to consciously use it in poetry (which is necessarily a transformative move) only works when it’s taken up by our most gifted poets. Let’s not forget Dante Alighieri, after all.

Martin
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Thanks so much for the suggestions. Trilce of course is amazing. I haven’t read it in a while and when I went looking for it I could find, but I know it’s somewhere in my shelves. I’ve never read the Genet (thanks for the tip).

I should have said this in the post. There’s a page (the last one in the book) which starts “Why not check it out and lock it down”…it’s and extensive list of prison narrative/prison related books…a very worthwhile compilation

Martin
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This was excellent. Your opening made me smile. I am glad you said this.

You remember how inmates used to make license plates? No one talks about it anymore, but inmates make a lot of the products we use ‘on the outside’. And this is in part why incarceration is such a large industry. It is modern day American slave labor. It is a billion dollar industry. Therefore, it will never go away. Unless there is something done about it by us, the ‘other’ citizens.

Your review is powerful, beyond the opening statements. I felt your adoration and respect for the work, and I appreciate it. This is what poetry should be, beyond classifications. Sure, we can categorize Wright’s work, as it is a natural part of human nature to assign categories and hierarchies. But you assign these tags (Eliot, Whitman, Williams) only to serve the reader of your review, to give them a foothold on something they may know, to tell them this is not exactly what this is, this is an evolved version (not to say the previous poets are somehow less, or devolved) — it is same, only different, only not the same….

And it is this gelatin like malleability which gives great poetry its foothold, you know? Much like the Luster’s photographs attempt (possibly) to make the statement, although times have changed, incarceration has not, Wright’s poetry will mold to its times years down the road and never truly be “aged”, as ‘time’ itself is unaging (the poem).

No matter the vernacular, I believe. As one tends to think employing certain vernaculars will essentially age a work, I believe this will not be the case.

But I must buy this book now.

When I stop being poor that is. I’m resorting to selling my books at Half-Price books out here in North Texas, just to buy some more books. It’s horrible! To have to sell your babies…
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Nor E.E. Cummings, whose Enormous Room I never knew about till I read on it here. It’s not verse, but if that stops you, you don’t deserve it.
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PS Your introductory paragraph, about the professional artisans labouring away, could be a post in and of itself!
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Excellent of you to lead us to Knight’s poem, a fascinating meditation and very apropos to the present post, since the poem is about the prisoner poet contemplating a wall full of photographs. I’ll take the liberty to cite the first stanza, because like Wright, he hones so close to his subject. There’s absolutely no fat, no sentimentality..

Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.
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This is an absolutely crucial addition…I beg everyone to follow the link you’ve provided.

Thanks so much,

Martin
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Etheridge Knight (1931-1991) was a good ‘prison poet.’

His poem, ‘The Idea of Ancestry,’

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15410

made it to the Sweet 16 in the March Madness Tourney reported in the “Is it the end of poetry?” thread.

Thomas
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Kent
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