By Gee Henry
Your poems hold a powerful mirror up to the face of society, and seem to deem the reader as culpable in a crime as the narrator himself. Do you expect that the reader will assume all the poems are autobiographical? If so, is that what you intended?
I can certainly understand how the reader might assume that all of the poems in the book are about me. However, that is and isn’t the case. I’m not necessarily an ‘I” type of writer to begin with. If you examine the totality of my aesthetic production over the year, I think {#289-128} falls in line with that continued investigation through not only poetic disruption, but forsaking the “I” for the sake of the “I.” If I am going to bear witness, then the narrative needs to tell the whole truth.
I have always been more interested in everything around the “I” in terms of personal aesthetics. There is a collective (We) in {#289-128} that puts humanity on display and trial. Yes, I have witnessed and/or experienced the ugly that is the inside, and I could situate myself as a rhetorical witness and recount from memory countless thematic threads, but in doing that, I feel that I’m not giving the reader everything I can in terms of a total experience—what about the couple in Cell 22? Actually, I feel I am doing the reader and poetry a disservice if I don’t go down these roads of creative inquiry.
I think it is also important to note I am not this great miscarriage of justice in that I did what I did in terms of my so-called crimes against the state. I dedicated thirty years of my life to the illicit and the illegal. I went to the inside as a full-grown man. While {#289-128} definitely questions who is the real illegal, it is presented in such a way that challenges where one stands on reform in a very deep and moral way.
And so, the question has to be asked: how do you come at your social justice advocacy? Do you only want the feel-good story; or, are you willing to redeem those who once seemed unredeemable? It can get complicated in that way.
Were you writing before you had your own experiences with addiction and incarceration? Can you describe how your relationship to writing has evolved as a result of those two experiences?
Do you feel like prison has the capacity to “rehabilitate” people?
I was not writing before I went to the inside. I should mention that I don’t believe in the word prison, felon, convict, ex-convict, inmate and all of those negative stereotypes of language that further criminalizes the “so-called criminal” after their return to society. It only deepens the stain, that mark one is trying to shed after release. I will explain further but let me address your questions.
I began writing on the inside while in a program in county detention waiting to go upstate to the department of corrections. In the state of Maryland.
It was through the personal essay that I begin to understand the power of language and how words could help re-imagine my life after serving my time. There are two women that are responsible for making me believe I could be a writer. The first is Pat Parker who, as a social worker, conducted a writing group in a program called Jail Addiction Service (JAS), a program which forced us to get gut level with our own shortcomings and deal with the self in a very personal way. Each night I would sit in my cell and put clear plastic pen to yellow legal pad and in the process, I fell in love with language. I know it may sound cliché, but that is it.
I think the last question will clarify my first point about language and rehabilitation. You asked: “Do you feel like prison has the capacity to “rehabilitate” people?”
It is hard to expect public rehabilitation and forgiveness when there are rhetorical strategies set in place that never lets one cut the cord from detained citizen to free citizen; more specifically, the language that perpetuates the idea that criminal justice is dead weight—an anvil around the neck, so to speak. And then too, I can claim cats like Hell Naw, Sebastian, Deboe, Big Pun, Black, Old School and Milkman in Housing Unit III C-Tier helped rehabilitate me more than any government system could. There is a humanity on the inside that gets overlooked in the violence.
When I read some of the poems, I was seized with a visceral sense of anger. That’s because I’m angry at how the criminal justice system targets Black and Hispanic men—especially young ones. And because the poems were so beautiful, I was angry that the narrator’s voice was incarcerated for so long. But poetry is such a different medium than other forms of writing. So I wondered if you wanted the reader to feel angry, reading the book?
To be honest, I want the reader to feel human with a moral compass. This is getting back to stepping outside the [I] to create that visual and visceral experience through language, and so consequently, that anger is channeled by the writer through aesthetics and hopefully receivedby the reader in an exchange that leads to transformation.
I noticed that you name-checked one of Mitchell Jackson’s books in yours. Do you read the work of other formerly incarcerated writers?
I do. I mean, we are a small club. I know Mitchell Jackson, as well as Reginald Dwayne Betts. It is kind of hard for us not to know each other. In the poem that you reference, which is a long poem titled: roxbury correctional book club, I am using The Residue Years by Mitchell in Section I to talk about the many Champs that are currently behind bars. In The Residue Years, Champ is the main protagonist who gets sucked into the world of drug selling as a way to enjoy economic freedom. Section I is direct a critique on The War on Drugs. Every book mentioned in that section is written by a formerly detained writer except Robert Hayden whose poem “The Prisoner” talks about visiting a detention center.
Are there any poets who specifically influenced {#289-128}?
In terms of aesthetics, I would say Stephen Jonas and Ed Roberson, but in terms of experience and reference, none. There ain’t too many poets walking around that are former international drug dealers who rode in Cessnas and cigarette boats through Horseshoe Mountain into Hatchet Bay trying to make it happen. I have yet to meet the poet robbed at gunpoint 2 miles from Orange Bowl in Miami facing every automatic weapon meant to blow a joker into the 4th Dimension, surviving only the gift of gab. I have yet to meet that poet or writer whose best friend was shot seven times in the face with a .357, with the body being thrown in a bathtub and electrocuted with a plugged-in iron. Perhaps the only writer that comes remotely close to any of my experiences is Mitchell. I mean to be honest; I was so deeply embedded in the underworld that the idea of being a poet mighta got you shot.
I noticed that one of the book’s parts borrowed a title from Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York. Was there anything about Lorca that your narrator related to?
The relationship between the narrator and Lorca solely resides in the quote of being pigeonholed as one thing, as if the human experience was not varied and complex. Then, too, there is the relationship of witnessing New York for the first time.
I was gratified to see a few of the Democratic presidential contenders say that criminal justice reform was important to them. Did you feel a shift, perhaps some hope for the situation, like I did?
I am hopeful that we can expedite the dialogue and get to the real work of making it happen. I come from the you can show me way better than you can tell me school of thought. This country is great at lip service, at selling dreams. Understand, change is hard. You have to do change. I think it is sad that a man had to die on national TV, not being able to breathe for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, for people to wake up to the unrelenting reality and at times, nightmare, that can be the American experience. Yes, I am hopeful.
I know most of these poems can be viewed as political, but do you consider yourself a political person?
No pun intended, but I was born Black. I have no choice but to be political. I was born in 1961 in Birmingham, Alabama. I was a premature baby who arrived at seven months and had to be placed in an incubator in an all-white baby ward. Because the hospital was segregated, my mother did not get a chance to hold me for 11 days. I was two years old when the dynamite blast that killed four little girls on a Sunday morning shook my crib eight-blocks away in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Smithfield. My mother and I integrated Jefferson County School System as teacher and student in 1972. I lasted one year because I refused to be called nigger every day in the 3rd grade—somebody had to pay for that—and I made somebody pay. And so, my very existence is a political statement.
Do you have a favorite of these poems?
My favorite poem is perhaps: remember as it gets to the very harsh reality that is the inside.
Are there any resources that you’d suggest for poets—especially Black poets—to explore as they are beginning their writing careers?
I think resources can be found in one way or another. I want to give a bit of advice. Take chances in your writing. Don’t be a monotone drone and sound like everyone else. Explore your own your individuality, be an individual sound. It is okay to leap into the unknown.
With that said, I would say explore the poets that have led very interesting lives before coming to the page. These poets tend to have very interesting aesthetics—find your aesthetic, if one can. It is always a peekaboo game of now you see me, now you don’t. Think about creative inquiry within the lines.
In terms of Black poets, specifically, for me, I went to an MFA program that focused solely on the Black experience at Chicago State University.
In order to advance to the thesis stage a student needs to pass qualifying exams that touched on poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays and critical theory, much like a PhD program. What I am trying to get it–there is no shortcut to the long game, as in you cannot fake the blues for handclap; and yet, many have tried. With that said, one need not be in academia. One only needs to have an understanding of Black critical and creative production from the slave narratives to the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement and beyond.
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Gee Henry is a writer who was born in Antigua and now lives in Manhattan. Find him on Twitter at @geehenry