Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 9 - To Prisoners - full transcript
"To Prisoners" by Gwendolyn Brooks, featuring Anna Deveare Smith, John McCain, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Li-Young Lee, and Innocence Project Exonerees.
When I went
to prison I was 19 years old.
How does a 19-year-old adapt
to a place
where most of the people there
aren't going home until they're
at the age of retirement?
It's a dreadful place.
It's a dark place.
Waking up, and
the realization of where you are
when you see prison bars,
and knowing that the only way
to get out of that cell
is somebody else
has to let you out.
It's like a chill
that you can't shake.
You just feel it.
It's something
that you want to escape,
but it's just there with you,
it's part of who you are.
Then you have no choice.
You have to cultivate
some things to go it alone.
"To Prisoners"
by Gwendolyn Brooks.
I call for you cultivation
of strength in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes
of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I call for you
cultivation of victory
Over long blows
that you want to give
and blows you are going to get.
Over what wants to crumble
you down, to sicken you.
I call for you
cultivation of strength
to heal and enhance
in the non-cheering dark,
in the many, many
mornings-after,
in the chalk and choke.
Prison was...
Several years ago,
I had a chance to speak
with Senator John McCain
about this experiences
as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
Shock, sorrow, anger...
Although Senator McCain
had recorded many interviews
in which he described
his imprisonment,
what I wanted to explore
with him was a story I'd heard
about prisoners
in the Hanoi Hilton
using poetry
to keep their spirits up.
The trail was bad
and I felt half mad...
As Senator McCain
performed for me
120 lines of a poem
he'd memorized in his cell,
I began to think about
the special power of poetry
for those in prison.
It was jammed in the ice,
but I saw in a trice...
This is what led me, ultimately,
to Gwendolyn Brooks's poem,
"To Prisoners."
Winner if the Pulitzer Prize
in 1950,
Brooks's early poetry shed light
on the confined lives
of her inner city neighbors.
And by the '60s,
she was following some of them
into prison,
teaching in penal institutions,
and mentoring
incarcerated poets.
Brooks was one of the poets
Reginald Dwayne Betts read
in solitary confinement
while composing
his first book of poems.
- ...which I think
is Gwendolyn Brooks' strength.
And Brooks was also
an inspiration
to poet Li-Young Lee,
whose father was a
political prisoner in Indonesia.
I've been working on a play,
which is about prisons...
Anna Deavere Smith's play
on the school-to-prison pipeline
attuned her to the sorrow
and hope in Brooks's poem.
And without ever having
read Brooks before,
the four exonerated men
I asked to read
"To Prisoners" with me
brought the same depth
and generosity
I remembered hearing
in Senator McCain's voice.
- A strength that was
transmitted to each other
through the walls.
I call for you
cultivation of strength
in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and
coyotes of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
The first words of the poem
are "I call for you."
So I'm wondering what you hear
when you hear
the "I call for you."
Man, she's a poet
of, like, great benediction.
"I call for you."
That's like
one of the ancient technologies,
one of the ancient technologies
in poetry
is to call, to summon.
The poem, just as its
title, is somewhat nonspecific.
Its images are, too.
It doesn't say, "I call to you
who are behind bars,
who eat bad food."
Instead, it begins "dark
gardening in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis."
It's a way in which language
can become a medium
that speaks to you
beyond the sort of articulation
of what the individual words
mean.
Yeah, vertigo cold.
You can't see up, vertigo.
You can't feel
where your feet go.
Yeah.
Vertigo cold is a form
of disorientation.
"In the hot paralysis."
Heat, cold,
this is opposing thing.
"In a vertigo cold.
In a hot paralysis."
It's huge extremes in prison.
I can remember
in the wintertime,
you don't have a heater
or a temperature control
in your cell, right?
So, sometimes, oftentimes,
those cells are ice cold.
In the summertime,
you can't just go
and turn the air conditioner on,
right?
So those... the walls sweat.
I think, my strongest
memory is the heat.
Starting in about March
or April, it'd get very hot.
And our rooms
were not ventilated.
All of the windows and
everything were blocked off
cause they didn't want us
to see each other.
And it used to get
incredibly hot in those rooms,
and, of course, we didn't
have any hygiene or anything.
We would get boils,
you get dysentery.
In the hot type
environment, you exhausted.
We get stuck.
We get lazy, we get jaded,
and that's what it sound like
the "hot paralysis" is.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes
of particular silences.
And then "under
the wolves and coyotes
of particular silences,"
which is a double-edged thing,
because it's both
the actual wolves and coyotes,
the actual animals that you hear
in the woods
in the prisons depending on
where you're incarcerated,
but it's also the wolves
and coyotes who are sometimes
like the men in prison.
So the wolves
and coyotes, to me,
is almost symbolic
of the officers and the inmates
that are always preying
on each other in many ways.
You have the officers
who will victimize individuals,
and you'll have prisoners
who will victimize.
That's exactly how
the prison culture is.
It makes you feel
as if you're alone,
you're by yourself,
and you're being preyed on.
In a way, maybe she's assigning
that coyote and that wolf
to the danger in silence.
And the reason why
it's in "particular silences"
is because prison is a place
where silence was used
to mask all the pain
and the suffering.
And that's why
they kept us for years
in solitary confinement.
Those that did not communicate,
it was...
had very unfortunate results.
Because they would live
inside their own...
Exactly.
And they feel abandoned.
One of the things you recognize
is that the silence in and
around prisons is pervasive.
So Joseph Brodsky says,
"The people who forgot me
will make a city."
And Raymond Patterson says,
"There are cities
buried inside black men."
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I think sterility
is the greatest danger here.
We have death tendencies, we do.
So choking, dryness, sterility
are attributes of the enemy.
She's giving the benediction,
but what she ends on
is "chalk and choke."
Like those are the last words.
Yeah, chalk, I mean that is...
- What does that chalk do?
- It's powerful.
I don't know
what that chalk means.
I mean, to me, the chalk
is more, more troubling
than the coyotes.
- The chalk and choke...
- Feels like alkaline, bones.
Bones, chalk.
The white thing that is hard
and becomes dust.
I think chalk and choke
are kind of specific
in a sense that...
In a sense that it just
paints the picture
of, like, death and darkness.
We know what the chalk
represents, and we know...
What does the chalk represent?
The chalk outline
of dead bodies.
When you think about
what are you doing with chalk?
You're writing on the board,
and then you can erase it.
So it's almost being
extinguished.
Chalk I almost use as symbolic
that I was being written off.
That the criminal justice system
and the prosecutors
were writing me off,
and hoping that my life
would be choked out.
"Mornings-after" I think about
the morning I was found guilty.
The morning after
I was arrested.
The morning after
every single negative event.
Gosh,
just listening to those words.
I can remember how, you know,
one morning becomes 360 mornings
before you know it.
Because it's not a one-day thing
that you recover.
So it takes many mornings,
many nights.
If I couldn't cultivate
an inner strength
to get past those mornings,
I probably would not be here
where I am today.
Cultivation of strength
in the dark.
Dark gardening.
Growing things,
like growing things.
The poem's more so about
cultivation, gardening,
and it sounds like it's using
the metaphor of planting.
We're going to find what we need
when it is not given to us.
"And on I went,
though the dogs were spent,
"and the grub was getting low.
"The trail was bad,
and I felt half mad,
but I swore
I would not give in."
I used to know it all by heart,
but that was quite
a few years ago.
The most important question
really to ask you
is how you learned this poem.
For a period of time,
I guess it was a couple years
I was next door to a cell
to a fella
whose name was Bill Lawrence.
And we had this tap code.
So he would tap to me
a couple lines of this every day
for quite a while.
And I would then
tap it back to him,
and that's how I learned it.
And so you were reciting poetry
to each other.
And he was reciting this poem
to me.
And I would type back
what he'd typed to me,
and then afterwards
I would go over it
and add it to what
I had already known.
One thing you have in prison is
plenty of time.
To keep your mind active
is really important
in that environment.
Cultivation.
Yeah, work, practice.
Man, it's practice.
What are we cultivating?
Strength in the dark.
Dark gardening.
Unseen gardening, right?
Inner gardening.
The poem points
to the inner world,
the esoteric world,
not the exoteric world.
That's calling for your
strength, your inner strength,
your faith to continue
to push forward.
You're dealing with dirt,
and it's supposed to be
no good for anybody.
But when you start throwing in
the fertilizer and the seeds
and all the other things,
you can actually build something
from nothing.
I call for you
cultivation of victory.
Over long blows
that you want to give
and blows you are going to get.
I was never beaten very badly
up until the time
I refused early release.
But after that,
it was very severe for...
about eight or nine months
as they attempted to get a
war crimes confession out of me.
The thing that
I keep stumbling over
is where it says "the long blows
you want to give."
She's basically saying victory
over that impulse, right?
And so she's calling for
a cultivation of strength,
and a cultivation of victory...
Very nice.
...over these blows,
which is a victory
over violence,
which is a victory,
a kind of self-control,
cultivate that.
I don't think our relationship
with safety and violence
is as cut and dry as we think.
I think this whole poem
is like a recipe
for the safe human being.
The Daoists said that
a safe human being is somebody
who stands in a marketplace,
his cheeks smudged with dirt
and smile on his face,
and he blesses
what needs to be blessed,
and he kills what needs to be
killed.
That's a safe human being.
She's suggesting
the very same thing here.
What were some of the
traits of your fellow prisoners
that you admired most?
Courage, ingenuity.
Humor.
A sense of humor
is very important.
If you don't have that,
you have a tendency...
Your captor to become
larger and larger
and more and more powerful,
and therefore you're
more and more intimidated.
If you laugh at him, then it
puts him back to their...
their actual size.
"To Prisoners,"
with its repetition of the call,
and its multiple instances
of parallelism,
has an irregular
but highly effective structure.
The longer lines
seem to extend themselves
to widen the poem's scope
and expand its compassion,
while shorter ones
acknowledge pain and insult.
The line breaks seem to carry us
over trials and obstacles,
or drop us into the void.
The most important
of Brooks's formal decisions
is her arrangement
of the three calls,
each seeming to recognize a
slightly different "you."
The poem has three parts, right?
It has these three movements,
and the first is sort of
acknowledging
the darkness of prison, right?
And at first it's acknowledging
what you have had to overcome.
In other words,
I will do this for you,
on your behalf.
I call for your sake.
Yes.
A cultivation of strength
in the dark.
I don't think
it's like a literal call,
it's not like a telephone call.
It's not even necessarily
audible.
It's something, somebody is
calling the prisoners
like in their mind.
And then if you take
the second movement:
"I call for you cultivation
of victory over long blows
that you want to give and blows
you are going to get."
So it's just this notion
that I see you,
I acknowledge
that you've struggled,
and I acknowledge that you
already achieved
the victory without me, right?
I believe poetry
is a profound way to count.
Counting is everything.
It's altogether about...
- Like a census.
- Right.
A census, but also what counts.
Does this count?
The last one,
with the you I call for you
does make it a little bit
more like you, specifically you.
It is like one of those great
tantric Buddhist paintings
of the saint
who's pointing out at you.
And it's saying,
"This is about you."
You know, actually,
what it made me think about
as well,
is the notion of a call.
You know, that people feel
they're called to do something.
The spiritual part comes out,
and you can hear it,
it's almost like
a call and response.
You know, I'm calling out,
and I'm seeing who's responding,
who's receptive
to what I'm trying to say.
Black sermonic rhetoric.
That type of call, which we do
find in the black church,
all of that calling,
all of that calling
is about the spirit.
To bring the spirit
into the moment,
and it doesn't have to be
that the preacher's carrying it,
it's not just one person
in the church,
but everybody is calling.
Everyone's calling on the lord.
Everyone's calling on the lord.
And on each other.
- And on each other.
Calling on each other
was what sustained John McCain
and his comrades
through torture and isolation.
When I would go
to interrogation,
I would keep in mind that I was
going to go back to my cell,
and I was going to tap
on the wall to Bill Lawrence,
and others, what happened to me.
And I didn't want
to let them down.
You know, we weren't tapping
military secrets to each other
or anything like that.
We were just keeping
each other's spirits up.
So I used to teach
in middle school,
and one of the challenges really
was to try to figure
how to make the students
recognize that the poem
talked to them,
even if it wasn't about them.
Or how the poem might be
about them,
even if it seemingly
wasn't about them.
The notion "Prisoners" does that
because I could map onto this
entire poem, which I've done,
all of my experiences
with incarceration.
But I'm absolutely certain
that somebody else
could read this
and map on their experiences
of dealing with depression.
And maybe this is just
the gift of Gwendolyn Brooks.
We know that she was
talking about prisoners,
and yet through
that specificity,
we are able to speak
to these much larger pieces
of the human condition.
I don't know whether
it's my mood today,
I feel it's about life.
I think it's about families.
I think it's about
fathers, and mothers, and, um...
and I think it's about
relationships.
It's as if Gwendolyn Brooks
dissected the feelings of both
the people who are there,
and the people who are affected
by the people being there.
When a person goes to prison,
their family takes a hit.
The wrinkles and creases
of anguish
that line my mother's forehead
in the visiting room
were a result of her
not being there physically,
but mentally being in prison
with me that entire stretch.
Brooks wrote "To Prisoners"
in the 1980s
during the last years
of South African Apartheid,
and when the plight
of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela
began to attract world attention
to the sufferings
of the unjustly incarcerated.
And what it speaks to is
the concept of prison itself
and, you know, whether it be
America, or other countries.
Yeah, there's no
qualifications... it's prisoners.
She doesn't say
to the prisoners in Attica,
the prisoners in Sing Sing.
- Right.
The prisoners in South Africa,
to the prisoners in Indonesia.
She doesn't say...
Right.
Well, she doesn't qualify it.
To prisoners.
- To prisoners.
- To prisoners.
So we have a poem
that begins in gardening,
and a call for cultivation of
strength in the dark,
and ends in the chalk and choke.
It doesn't really end
in the chalk and choke.
I'm sorry, I disagree.
Tell me why.
Because I think it ends with
"I call for you,
cultivation of strength
to heal and enhance."
That's where it ends.
The last movement says, "I call
for you to heal and enhance."
And so it's this notion
that you are valued.
You have a job to do.
But also that you
are needed, right.
That you have a role in this.
You're actually
going to make a contribution
in the dark,
in the morning after,
in the chalk and in the choke.
Oh, you are in all those places
still doing it.
Yes.
So it's the wounded healer,
it's the wounded healer.
After we've been tore down,
after the soil's
been turned over,
now it's time to start growing,
to pick yourself up.
You know, if every one of us
has a metaphorical hammer,
and we chip away at the wall,
and every now and then
a wall comes down,
meaning a barrier is broken,
we break through.
You have a chance
in these prisons
that whether it's a real prison
or the prison of inequality,
or the prison
of a horrible family.
You have a chance, which is to...
Give.
To give,
and to find that in yourself.
I think about the poem
generally,
that's saying "to prisoners,"
and the reader is thinking,
"What are you saying
to prisoners?"
And a prisoner who reads this
says, "What are you saying?
What do you want me to do?"
What she's saying,
prison is not your story,
it doesn't end there.
There are, in fact, many,
many mornings that come after,
and you are needed
in those mornings, right?
I mean the funny thing is prison
is just a small part of it.
I was gone
for eight-and-a-half years.
I'm every day in a process
of figuring out what it means
to, like, be a human being
in this world.
You still have to find out
how to love somebody.
You still have to find out
like how to actively
be a friend in the world.
You still have to find out
how to raise a child.
I was privileged to observe
a thousand acts of courage,
and compassion, and love.
It's a great honor of my life.
I call for you
cultivation of strength
in the dark.
Dark garden in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes
of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I call for you,
cultivation of victory over
long blows that you want to give
and blows you're going to get.
Over what wants to crumble you
down to sicken you.
I call for you,
cultivation of strength,
to heal and enhance
in the non-cheering dark.
In the many,
many mornings-after.
In the chalk and choke.
to prison I was 19 years old.
How does a 19-year-old adapt
to a place
where most of the people there
aren't going home until they're
at the age of retirement?
It's a dreadful place.
It's a dark place.
Waking up, and
the realization of where you are
when you see prison bars,
and knowing that the only way
to get out of that cell
is somebody else
has to let you out.
It's like a chill
that you can't shake.
You just feel it.
It's something
that you want to escape,
but it's just there with you,
it's part of who you are.
Then you have no choice.
You have to cultivate
some things to go it alone.
"To Prisoners"
by Gwendolyn Brooks.
I call for you cultivation
of strength in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes
of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I call for you
cultivation of victory
Over long blows
that you want to give
and blows you are going to get.
Over what wants to crumble
you down, to sicken you.
I call for you
cultivation of strength
to heal and enhance
in the non-cheering dark,
in the many, many
mornings-after,
in the chalk and choke.
Prison was...
Several years ago,
I had a chance to speak
with Senator John McCain
about this experiences
as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
Shock, sorrow, anger...
Although Senator McCain
had recorded many interviews
in which he described
his imprisonment,
what I wanted to explore
with him was a story I'd heard
about prisoners
in the Hanoi Hilton
using poetry
to keep their spirits up.
The trail was bad
and I felt half mad...
As Senator McCain
performed for me
120 lines of a poem
he'd memorized in his cell,
I began to think about
the special power of poetry
for those in prison.
It was jammed in the ice,
but I saw in a trice...
This is what led me, ultimately,
to Gwendolyn Brooks's poem,
"To Prisoners."
Winner if the Pulitzer Prize
in 1950,
Brooks's early poetry shed light
on the confined lives
of her inner city neighbors.
And by the '60s,
she was following some of them
into prison,
teaching in penal institutions,
and mentoring
incarcerated poets.
Brooks was one of the poets
Reginald Dwayne Betts read
in solitary confinement
while composing
his first book of poems.
- ...which I think
is Gwendolyn Brooks' strength.
And Brooks was also
an inspiration
to poet Li-Young Lee,
whose father was a
political prisoner in Indonesia.
I've been working on a play,
which is about prisons...
Anna Deavere Smith's play
on the school-to-prison pipeline
attuned her to the sorrow
and hope in Brooks's poem.
And without ever having
read Brooks before,
the four exonerated men
I asked to read
"To Prisoners" with me
brought the same depth
and generosity
I remembered hearing
in Senator McCain's voice.
- A strength that was
transmitted to each other
through the walls.
I call for you
cultivation of strength
in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and
coyotes of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
The first words of the poem
are "I call for you."
So I'm wondering what you hear
when you hear
the "I call for you."
Man, she's a poet
of, like, great benediction.
"I call for you."
That's like
one of the ancient technologies,
one of the ancient technologies
in poetry
is to call, to summon.
The poem, just as its
title, is somewhat nonspecific.
Its images are, too.
It doesn't say, "I call to you
who are behind bars,
who eat bad food."
Instead, it begins "dark
gardening in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis."
It's a way in which language
can become a medium
that speaks to you
beyond the sort of articulation
of what the individual words
mean.
Yeah, vertigo cold.
You can't see up, vertigo.
You can't feel
where your feet go.
Yeah.
Vertigo cold is a form
of disorientation.
"In the hot paralysis."
Heat, cold,
this is opposing thing.
"In a vertigo cold.
In a hot paralysis."
It's huge extremes in prison.
I can remember
in the wintertime,
you don't have a heater
or a temperature control
in your cell, right?
So, sometimes, oftentimes,
those cells are ice cold.
In the summertime,
you can't just go
and turn the air conditioner on,
right?
So those... the walls sweat.
I think, my strongest
memory is the heat.
Starting in about March
or April, it'd get very hot.
And our rooms
were not ventilated.
All of the windows and
everything were blocked off
cause they didn't want us
to see each other.
And it used to get
incredibly hot in those rooms,
and, of course, we didn't
have any hygiene or anything.
We would get boils,
you get dysentery.
In the hot type
environment, you exhausted.
We get stuck.
We get lazy, we get jaded,
and that's what it sound like
the "hot paralysis" is.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes
of particular silences.
And then "under
the wolves and coyotes
of particular silences,"
which is a double-edged thing,
because it's both
the actual wolves and coyotes,
the actual animals that you hear
in the woods
in the prisons depending on
where you're incarcerated,
but it's also the wolves
and coyotes who are sometimes
like the men in prison.
So the wolves
and coyotes, to me,
is almost symbolic
of the officers and the inmates
that are always preying
on each other in many ways.
You have the officers
who will victimize individuals,
and you'll have prisoners
who will victimize.
That's exactly how
the prison culture is.
It makes you feel
as if you're alone,
you're by yourself,
and you're being preyed on.
In a way, maybe she's assigning
that coyote and that wolf
to the danger in silence.
And the reason why
it's in "particular silences"
is because prison is a place
where silence was used
to mask all the pain
and the suffering.
And that's why
they kept us for years
in solitary confinement.
Those that did not communicate,
it was...
had very unfortunate results.
Because they would live
inside their own...
Exactly.
And they feel abandoned.
One of the things you recognize
is that the silence in and
around prisons is pervasive.
So Joseph Brodsky says,
"The people who forgot me
will make a city."
And Raymond Patterson says,
"There are cities
buried inside black men."
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I think sterility
is the greatest danger here.
We have death tendencies, we do.
So choking, dryness, sterility
are attributes of the enemy.
She's giving the benediction,
but what she ends on
is "chalk and choke."
Like those are the last words.
Yeah, chalk, I mean that is...
- What does that chalk do?
- It's powerful.
I don't know
what that chalk means.
I mean, to me, the chalk
is more, more troubling
than the coyotes.
- The chalk and choke...
- Feels like alkaline, bones.
Bones, chalk.
The white thing that is hard
and becomes dust.
I think chalk and choke
are kind of specific
in a sense that...
In a sense that it just
paints the picture
of, like, death and darkness.
We know what the chalk
represents, and we know...
What does the chalk represent?
The chalk outline
of dead bodies.
When you think about
what are you doing with chalk?
You're writing on the board,
and then you can erase it.
So it's almost being
extinguished.
Chalk I almost use as symbolic
that I was being written off.
That the criminal justice system
and the prosecutors
were writing me off,
and hoping that my life
would be choked out.
"Mornings-after" I think about
the morning I was found guilty.
The morning after
I was arrested.
The morning after
every single negative event.
Gosh,
just listening to those words.
I can remember how, you know,
one morning becomes 360 mornings
before you know it.
Because it's not a one-day thing
that you recover.
So it takes many mornings,
many nights.
If I couldn't cultivate
an inner strength
to get past those mornings,
I probably would not be here
where I am today.
Cultivation of strength
in the dark.
Dark gardening.
Growing things,
like growing things.
The poem's more so about
cultivation, gardening,
and it sounds like it's using
the metaphor of planting.
We're going to find what we need
when it is not given to us.
"And on I went,
though the dogs were spent,
"and the grub was getting low.
"The trail was bad,
and I felt half mad,
but I swore
I would not give in."
I used to know it all by heart,
but that was quite
a few years ago.
The most important question
really to ask you
is how you learned this poem.
For a period of time,
I guess it was a couple years
I was next door to a cell
to a fella
whose name was Bill Lawrence.
And we had this tap code.
So he would tap to me
a couple lines of this every day
for quite a while.
And I would then
tap it back to him,
and that's how I learned it.
And so you were reciting poetry
to each other.
And he was reciting this poem
to me.
And I would type back
what he'd typed to me,
and then afterwards
I would go over it
and add it to what
I had already known.
One thing you have in prison is
plenty of time.
To keep your mind active
is really important
in that environment.
Cultivation.
Yeah, work, practice.
Man, it's practice.
What are we cultivating?
Strength in the dark.
Dark gardening.
Unseen gardening, right?
Inner gardening.
The poem points
to the inner world,
the esoteric world,
not the exoteric world.
That's calling for your
strength, your inner strength,
your faith to continue
to push forward.
You're dealing with dirt,
and it's supposed to be
no good for anybody.
But when you start throwing in
the fertilizer and the seeds
and all the other things,
you can actually build something
from nothing.
I call for you
cultivation of victory.
Over long blows
that you want to give
and blows you are going to get.
I was never beaten very badly
up until the time
I refused early release.
But after that,
it was very severe for...
about eight or nine months
as they attempted to get a
war crimes confession out of me.
The thing that
I keep stumbling over
is where it says "the long blows
you want to give."
She's basically saying victory
over that impulse, right?
And so she's calling for
a cultivation of strength,
and a cultivation of victory...
Very nice.
...over these blows,
which is a victory
over violence,
which is a victory,
a kind of self-control,
cultivate that.
I don't think our relationship
with safety and violence
is as cut and dry as we think.
I think this whole poem
is like a recipe
for the safe human being.
The Daoists said that
a safe human being is somebody
who stands in a marketplace,
his cheeks smudged with dirt
and smile on his face,
and he blesses
what needs to be blessed,
and he kills what needs to be
killed.
That's a safe human being.
She's suggesting
the very same thing here.
What were some of the
traits of your fellow prisoners
that you admired most?
Courage, ingenuity.
Humor.
A sense of humor
is very important.
If you don't have that,
you have a tendency...
Your captor to become
larger and larger
and more and more powerful,
and therefore you're
more and more intimidated.
If you laugh at him, then it
puts him back to their...
their actual size.
"To Prisoners,"
with its repetition of the call,
and its multiple instances
of parallelism,
has an irregular
but highly effective structure.
The longer lines
seem to extend themselves
to widen the poem's scope
and expand its compassion,
while shorter ones
acknowledge pain and insult.
The line breaks seem to carry us
over trials and obstacles,
or drop us into the void.
The most important
of Brooks's formal decisions
is her arrangement
of the three calls,
each seeming to recognize a
slightly different "you."
The poem has three parts, right?
It has these three movements,
and the first is sort of
acknowledging
the darkness of prison, right?
And at first it's acknowledging
what you have had to overcome.
In other words,
I will do this for you,
on your behalf.
I call for your sake.
Yes.
A cultivation of strength
in the dark.
I don't think
it's like a literal call,
it's not like a telephone call.
It's not even necessarily
audible.
It's something, somebody is
calling the prisoners
like in their mind.
And then if you take
the second movement:
"I call for you cultivation
of victory over long blows
that you want to give and blows
you are going to get."
So it's just this notion
that I see you,
I acknowledge
that you've struggled,
and I acknowledge that you
already achieved
the victory without me, right?
I believe poetry
is a profound way to count.
Counting is everything.
It's altogether about...
- Like a census.
- Right.
A census, but also what counts.
Does this count?
The last one,
with the you I call for you
does make it a little bit
more like you, specifically you.
It is like one of those great
tantric Buddhist paintings
of the saint
who's pointing out at you.
And it's saying,
"This is about you."
You know, actually,
what it made me think about
as well,
is the notion of a call.
You know, that people feel
they're called to do something.
The spiritual part comes out,
and you can hear it,
it's almost like
a call and response.
You know, I'm calling out,
and I'm seeing who's responding,
who's receptive
to what I'm trying to say.
Black sermonic rhetoric.
That type of call, which we do
find in the black church,
all of that calling,
all of that calling
is about the spirit.
To bring the spirit
into the moment,
and it doesn't have to be
that the preacher's carrying it,
it's not just one person
in the church,
but everybody is calling.
Everyone's calling on the lord.
Everyone's calling on the lord.
And on each other.
- And on each other.
Calling on each other
was what sustained John McCain
and his comrades
through torture and isolation.
When I would go
to interrogation,
I would keep in mind that I was
going to go back to my cell,
and I was going to tap
on the wall to Bill Lawrence,
and others, what happened to me.
And I didn't want
to let them down.
You know, we weren't tapping
military secrets to each other
or anything like that.
We were just keeping
each other's spirits up.
So I used to teach
in middle school,
and one of the challenges really
was to try to figure
how to make the students
recognize that the poem
talked to them,
even if it wasn't about them.
Or how the poem might be
about them,
even if it seemingly
wasn't about them.
The notion "Prisoners" does that
because I could map onto this
entire poem, which I've done,
all of my experiences
with incarceration.
But I'm absolutely certain
that somebody else
could read this
and map on their experiences
of dealing with depression.
And maybe this is just
the gift of Gwendolyn Brooks.
We know that she was
talking about prisoners,
and yet through
that specificity,
we are able to speak
to these much larger pieces
of the human condition.
I don't know whether
it's my mood today,
I feel it's about life.
I think it's about families.
I think it's about
fathers, and mothers, and, um...
and I think it's about
relationships.
It's as if Gwendolyn Brooks
dissected the feelings of both
the people who are there,
and the people who are affected
by the people being there.
When a person goes to prison,
their family takes a hit.
The wrinkles and creases
of anguish
that line my mother's forehead
in the visiting room
were a result of her
not being there physically,
but mentally being in prison
with me that entire stretch.
Brooks wrote "To Prisoners"
in the 1980s
during the last years
of South African Apartheid,
and when the plight
of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela
began to attract world attention
to the sufferings
of the unjustly incarcerated.
And what it speaks to is
the concept of prison itself
and, you know, whether it be
America, or other countries.
Yeah, there's no
qualifications... it's prisoners.
She doesn't say
to the prisoners in Attica,
the prisoners in Sing Sing.
- Right.
The prisoners in South Africa,
to the prisoners in Indonesia.
She doesn't say...
Right.
Well, she doesn't qualify it.
To prisoners.
- To prisoners.
- To prisoners.
So we have a poem
that begins in gardening,
and a call for cultivation of
strength in the dark,
and ends in the chalk and choke.
It doesn't really end
in the chalk and choke.
I'm sorry, I disagree.
Tell me why.
Because I think it ends with
"I call for you,
cultivation of strength
to heal and enhance."
That's where it ends.
The last movement says, "I call
for you to heal and enhance."
And so it's this notion
that you are valued.
You have a job to do.
But also that you
are needed, right.
That you have a role in this.
You're actually
going to make a contribution
in the dark,
in the morning after,
in the chalk and in the choke.
Oh, you are in all those places
still doing it.
Yes.
So it's the wounded healer,
it's the wounded healer.
After we've been tore down,
after the soil's
been turned over,
now it's time to start growing,
to pick yourself up.
You know, if every one of us
has a metaphorical hammer,
and we chip away at the wall,
and every now and then
a wall comes down,
meaning a barrier is broken,
we break through.
You have a chance
in these prisons
that whether it's a real prison
or the prison of inequality,
or the prison
of a horrible family.
You have a chance, which is to...
Give.
To give,
and to find that in yourself.
I think about the poem
generally,
that's saying "to prisoners,"
and the reader is thinking,
"What are you saying
to prisoners?"
And a prisoner who reads this
says, "What are you saying?
What do you want me to do?"
What she's saying,
prison is not your story,
it doesn't end there.
There are, in fact, many,
many mornings that come after,
and you are needed
in those mornings, right?
I mean the funny thing is prison
is just a small part of it.
I was gone
for eight-and-a-half years.
I'm every day in a process
of figuring out what it means
to, like, be a human being
in this world.
You still have to find out
how to love somebody.
You still have to find out
like how to actively
be a friend in the world.
You still have to find out
how to raise a child.
I was privileged to observe
a thousand acts of courage,
and compassion, and love.
It's a great honor of my life.
I call for you
cultivation of strength
in the dark.
Dark garden in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes
of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I call for you,
cultivation of victory over
long blows that you want to give
and blows you're going to get.
Over what wants to crumble you
down to sicken you.
I call for you,
cultivation of strength,
to heal and enhance
in the non-cheering dark.
In the many,
many mornings-after.
In the chalk and choke.