(HOST) Commentator Deborah Luskin teaches writing to inmates, who use poetry as an opportunity to reflect on their past lives, current situation, and hopes for the future.
(LUSKIN) I teach writing in the Springfield prison. At the start of a recent poetry class, one of the twelve men sat at the table under his own black cloud. When I asked him to read aloud, he declined. Mostly, he scowled. An hour into the class I asked him again to read, and he again refused, muttering he didn’t think he should be coerced into sharing. I backed off.
When class ended, I asked him to stay, and I apologized for pressing him. I expressed concern that he didn’t want to participate, didn’t even seem to want to be in the room. With a voice full of scorn, he said, "I don’t belong here." He gestured toward the empty chairs where the others had been seated. "Most of these guys are sex offenders. I don’t belong with them."
I looked at him, hard. He’s a young man who’s already spent three years in jail, so while he may not be a sex offender, he’s been convicted of something serious.
I told him, "You’ve all done something to be here, and I don’t know what it is." Before he could tell me, I quickly added, "And I don’t want to know. As far as I’m concerned, everyone who enters this room is a poet."
This is true, and why the class works. It certainly got this student’s attention.
I told him that I liked teaching inmates more than the privileged Ivy League students I used to instruct. I like how inmates show a willingness to take risks, to speak up and to speak out. And I told him I didn’t think much of prison as a way of helping people make better choices, but that writing poetry was a way to make prison a more meaningful experience; writing poetry gave a man a chance to examine his life, and maybe begin to change.
"Are you spiritual?" he asked me.
"Why do you ask?" I said.
"Because you talked about my dark energy."
"Yeah. Well, you’re sucking the joy right out of the room. I can’t have that. You have to want to be here. Otherwise, I need to give the place to someone on the waiting list."
He was no longer objecting to sitting in class with sex offenders, but he wasn’t quite ready to concede.
"I’d like you to stay in the class," I said, "but you have to be present. So think about that."
While he was thinking, I took one last stab.
"I want to show you something," I said. I pointed my index finger at the wall, folding my other three fingers back, as if my hand were a gun. "When you point your finger at someone," I said, "three fingers point back at you."
He got it. He came back. He finished the course.
I don’t know what my students are in jail for. I know them only as men with poems to sing, poems that help them evaluate, understand, and even begin to change.