Vol. 3 | The Poetry Writing Workshop | Rob Halpern

This past May, the Women’s Huron Valley Poetry Workshop brought over 200 inmates and invited writers from the outside to the prison auditorium for a poetry reading, where the poets read their poems born from many hours of writing and workshopping in class. I had joined the workshop, formed in 2012 by Rob Halpern, as a co-facilitator six months prior to this reading, and the awe that this event struck in me seemed exceeded only by the awe of the poets themselves, some of whom had been in the class since its inception. That following week our workshop came together invigorated by what A had called a “collective enunciation” that had happened that evening, eager to discuss the powerful event. Even if much of the audience were inmates who came not for a love of poetry but a unique opportunity to socialize with friends (as S pointed out), what was undeniable was that no matter the reason, the room was enraptured not only by the individual poets’ work, but by how the whole evening cohered around a sense of solidarity. Something, we agreed, had been articulated in the poems that opened up a space for social relation and imagination in the otherwise unspeakable living conditions of the prison. During workshop, K reflected:

The last poem I read was basically a fuck you to the system, and there I was saying it, over and over in my poem, in not so many words. Even if an audience member wasn’t totally following the metaphor or image, there was a sense that people knew what was going on, and how the poem was making that happen.

M echoed this, saying, “Yeah, the poems allowed us to say something we couldn’t otherwise say to a group of people without getting in trouble - basically in code and metaphor.” M said that it was mind-blowing when R read a poem called “After the Prison,” that “it was like building an army with words.” I agreed, that both the veil of safety the poetic language provided and the sense of collectivity demonstrated by the workshop poets had mobilized a radical social. No matter the topic of the particular poem or politics of the poet, the reading served to spark a sense of possibility for a fugitive poetry inside the prison.

Later in the workshop we began to ask: What is this concept of a “fugitive poetics” that came into articulation at the reading, how does it materialize, and how can it build an imaginary beyond the limits of one’s current conditions? (As J put its, “By writing poetry, I can enter a world of ‘unknowns’”). Fugitivity connotes a sense of flight, persisting in a state of brokenness and resisting reduction. Fugitivity is, in many ways, inherent in poetry: a poem “breaks” language on the level of syntax, word, phoneme; it exists orally and textually, and allows for non-sense. A poem thrives when it resists: organization, linear logics, singular meaning. A poem is where fugitivity can be performed and realized in language, where the unspeakable, perhaps even the unthinkable, finds a way into legibility and possibility. We discussed how fugitivity is not only endemic to prison and poetry, but that there is a long history of fugitive modes of communication in cultures and histories which have been subject to violence, oppression, surveillance, and disciplinary tactics. Fugitivity has emerged in the forms of slave narratives and songs, in anti-colonial language practices, in queer expressions and aesthetics, in articulating immigrant consciousness, as well as in poetry written by women living under regimes of gendered violence.

We agreed it was a fugitive poetics that fostered that sense of solidarity in the prison auditorium that evening, and in the workshop we began to consider how fugitive poetics might help incarcerated poets “make a difference.” How can we, the poets asked, harness this fugitivity and provoke a sociality in the otherwise repressive mechanisms of the prison? In asking a poem to “make a difference,” or enable this space of sociality, we often turned back to the question of what we might mean by “material change.” A poem can’t improve the food served inside, can’t end the arbitrary daily violence, can’t get Internet access, or end the inhumane overpopulation at WHV. The poem can, however, testify to and document conditions and bodies trying to survive prison conditions, ask for reform, and to index personal trauma, transformation and healing. There is a sense, too, that the poem, beyond acting as a tool that grates against the systematic abstraction of criminalized & imprisoned bodies, can do something else: a poem can risk imagination. Deceptively modest, it is this possibility of imagining a world that doesn’t yet exist, we agreed, and that is a precondition to “material change”- not only to policy change aimed at fighting the inhumane conditions of the prison, but also in reshaping how justice is understood in our society, and resisting the institution of the prison and mass incarceration as we know it today.

In workshop we talk a lot about how one’s imagination is shaped by the conditions one lives under.  If the poem can be a space for saying the “unspeakable” and thinking the “unthinkable,” it is a tool to help think that which cannot be thought. The ways the prison tries to control inmates’ thoughts is omnipresent: A reported that the list of banned books is a mile long: she can’t get the Angela Davis book she wants to read, for example. K said that while it exists, the single copy of Sylvia Plath is constantly checked out. C said, “It’s the feeling of being frozen in time,” about the lack of access to internet and contemporary textbooks. What is thinkable, and by extension what is imaginable, is limited by the censorship, repression, and disciplinary mechanisms of the prison. Despite these material constraints, the workshop cites the poem as a strategy to transcend repressive conditions and imagine otherwise through proposing worlds, thoughts, and social relations that whose existence seems impossible.

Of course, this censorship goes both ways: the prison polices what is let outside as well. Unfavorable depiction of conditions inside – whether written or shared via telephone – could be deemed “inciteful” and could come with disciplinary consequences. The public’s imagination of life inside is materially constrained by this censorship; prisoners are not only removed from society, but invisibilized and made abstract. Writing about prison not only comes with the risk of “inciteful behavior” if one chooses to document inhumane conditions. As with any act of representation, it also comes with the risk of simplifying one’s own experience and thereby reinforcing the dehumanizing abstraction of life in prison while feeding redemptive narratives that justify the prison’s existence. This is something the workshop articulates again and again, particularly as it is made obvious by the types and motives of publications that solicit their work.

One poet A, refused until a few weeks ago to write about prison. In the poem about prison she ended up writing, called “Nothing and Everything,” she exemplifies a fugitive poetics that engages with the material limit of the imagination and refuses to essentialize her life lived inside. Throughout the poem she proclaims her refusal to write about “prison”:

I do not wish
to delve into the shit
green of the walls
or prepare a sermon
on the Balm of Gileads
that propagate
along those walls.

A’s refusal to write the prison is her fugitive way of writing the prison. While simultaneously listing its faults, A’s poem refuses to engage in a propagandistic mode of demonizing prison, thereby challenging both the inhumane prison conditions and flattened narratives of life in prison. A’s fugitive mode is all that is said in the “not-saying.” In this mode, A later writes, “the wall and the flower are so entwined I can’t tell one from the other anymore,” suggesting that the wall itself is arbitrary - is unimaginable, even before her very eyes. This also serves to show that the violence of the state is pervasive: that gendered, classed, and racialized violence is a reality that structures daily life and results in trauma and uneven precarity to certain populations. That is, the mechanisms of the prison don’t stop at the walls. This inability to “tell” refers the reader back to these material constraints of the imagination: hers and the readers. In so doing, she sparks an abolitionist imaginary: A both suggests the wall exists only as a symbol for the multitude of disciplinary tactics of the state and simultaneously disappears the wall, as we imagine it taken over by ivy. For three pages the poem continues “not-telling” the prison, and in the self-proclaimed resistance, ends up doing the work of both documenting & imagining. Her poetic imaginary moves beyond just denaturalizing the institution and abolishing prison, but gestures toward abolishing the larger carceral society. Paradoxically, in refusing to write the prison, A seemingly enacts a simple task that prison abolitionists repeat again and again: imagine a world without prisons.

Whether writing the prison or not, the poems from the poets at WHV are able to produce a space of fugitive sociality and radical imagination. The poems emerging from WHV can make legible the censored bodies and life inside prisons, making the violence to those living within thinking and sayable, while testifying to life where life itself is again and again repressed and abstracted. The poems - and the relations they embed - become acts of resistance in their mere existence. Perhaps the awe we all felt in the auditorium during the May reading, confronting the viscerally felt sense of solidarity, testified to a collectivity that couldn’t have been imagined without the poems. The following week we left class with a new prompt to write towards together: How can we write a fugitive poem?

-Rosie Stockton