If I had any romantic notions about who the prisoners were or where they came from, they were quickly dispelled by the front-gate patdowns, cavernous sound of steel closing on steel, and the deep grief in the inmates’ faces (made barely legible by a kind of coldness, though that’s not it, more like self-imposed distance).

It was March 2005, exactly forty years since Bloody Sunday in Selma and the same length of time to the week since King and marchers made their way across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, finally unimpeded, to Montgomery.

If there is any foolish time to be color blind it is on a drive from Auburn to Selma and back, a day trip I made on a day off between prison workshops. Selma is quiet — and eerie. There’s a small “museum” recalling the confrontations of 1965 and other significant Civil Rights events. It is, like the city, a tempestuous calm.

Black people are more likely to be convicted for drug crime and more likely to serve harsher sentences. This is inequity. Our judicial and legislative systems are flawed. The work of the Civil Rights movement isn’t done — black president or not.

Almost all the inmates’ faces at the two prisons I visited were black. They didn’t prove to me they could not express rage or appreciate delight (the taste of southern red clay on the tongue, one said). Neither workshop passed without laughter and good stories — some good poems too, and if not entire poems then damn good lines of poetry that could become whole poems. We should (and do) have enough poetry that can be given freely to the poor both in and out of prison. It is the most portable and cheapest of art forms.

Poetry is not guaranteed to transform miraculously or even merely rehabilitate those who have lead terrible, painful, and even gruesome lives, but poetry will erupt in the most unlikely places anyway. It is one of the few made things in the world that can alter, no matter how slightly, the ways everyone in a room can see. This is true for the ones who stay — behind bars — but also for the ones (like me) who, at the end of the day, drive home.
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I don’t see that my colleague is trying to “justify poetry through use” as you say. Poetry has, as have other forms of literature throughout history, served various functions, including that of providing pure aesthetic pleasure. At other times literature has veered more towards the instrumental. Dickens’ novels, especially Hard Times, are one such instance. Camille refers to the fact that we are living in a period of “real-time hard times” and I’m sure the eminent Victorian novelist would agree with her and see absolutely no reason not to bring poetry into the prisons. Just because it is being read in the prisons does not mean it is being “used”. Prisoners “read” just as non-prisoners do, and both groups make use of their reading as they will. Your alternative solutions certainly don’t preclude the programs referred to in the post above.

As for “ditzy intellectuals”, well, ditziness is a broad and much misunderstood category, certainly not confined to the intellectual classes.

Martin
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i can’t help but wonder why
this endless drive to justify poetry through use
is always at issue here. it is a little bit tiresome.

i’m sure it is theraputic and gives ditzy intellectuals many jobs at various educational institutions.

and on another note:

why not give some of those books to law-abiding citizens who can’t afford them? why not give those doctors treating prisoners to the law-abiding citizens who don’t have state sponsored health insurance?

Yes, I DO THINK IT IS A GOOD THING TO PRESENT HERE … DON’T GET ME WRONG… but I TOO AM HEIGHTENING AWARENESS.
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