Finding Freedom: My Years Teaching Poetry in a Correctional Facility
This originally appeared in the journal ‘Field Notes’ in 2008. (Since then, the online archive has dissolved but I am glad to be able to share the piece with you here.)
By Lilly Bechtel
“We read ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ by Wallace Stevens, and I thought it might be cool to pick something of our own to look at in thirteen different ways.”
Silence.
“Any ideas? Let’s throw some out there and then pick one.”
Mindy tentatively raises her hand and says “war?” There are a few moans and sharp exhales in response, a few shifts of hips in the confines of metal desks. We are in the basement room of the volunteer services building, where concrete poles support the center of the room. The desks are arranged in a semicircle, where the women sit with their notebooks and occasional mugs of coffee, clad in deep green pants and sweat shirts, spotless white tennis shoes. A single strip of fluorescent lights on the ceiling flickers sporadically, as if in perpetual seizure. On the lone chalkboard behind me, written in large letters, are the leftover words from a behavior modification class: “Moral dilemma: a problem with more than one answer.”
“OK, war. What else?”
Linda says, “I’m sick of thinking about the war because my brother is over there right now. I don’t want to write about that.”
Tanya agrees, “Yeah, my cousin just got back.”
“There’s more than one war to write about, though,” Sylvie says. “It doesn’t have to be the war in Iraq. I don’t know—we could write about global warming?”
Silence.
“What about poetry?” Sage asks from the back of the room.
“OK, so we’ve got war, poetry, and global warming. What else?”
“What about how to stay out of jail?” Tanya suggests, “that’s a topic we don’t know too much about.”
“Or the election?” Sylvie asks
Silence.
“OK, so we’ve got poetry, war, the election, global warming, and how to stay out of jail. Anyone else?”
“I don’t want to write about the election. I don’t get wrapped up in all that,” Cynthia says.
“What about writing about a single vote? What that means to all of us?” I ask, a little too earnestly.
The women in the class look sympathetically at me. It seems to hurt their eyebrows. “OK, so can we take a vote? Everyone has to vote,” I offer, looking at Cynthia. “We’ve got war. Any takers?”
No takers.
“Global warming?”
Sylvie’s hand shoots up.
“A single vote? Who wants to write about that?”
No hands.
“Why don’t we just stick to something safe, like poetry?” Mindy suggests.
“Safe?” I ask.
Mindy nods.
“We’ll write about anything we want, but we’ve got to decide,” I say, the feeling that I had once again swum out to the deep end rising in my chest.
The conversation then begins to crack into pieces with little chisels of it moving around the room. I can’t take my eyes off Tanya. She looks as if she is being tortured, and the pain has become boring. Suddenly Mindy throws both her hands up and said, “What about freedom?”
Everyone lights up.
“That’s great!” I say. “Thirteen ways of looking at freedom. Anyone disagree with this?”
No one does.
“So you can write as many stanzas as you want to, but each person will bring in one or two next week and we’ll see what happens. Take a look at the Stevens poem again if you want to get inspired.”
“You want it in poem form?” Tanya asks.
“Yes,” I say quickly, but then turn to her and say, “Wait. What do you mean by that?” She looks at me like I had just asked her what prison we’re in.
“Poem form. For the second time I’m asking you—do you want it in poem form?”
I pause, undoubtedly seeming unsure of myself, before I finally answer “Yes,” forgoing the difficult question of what it means to put anything into the form of a poem.
I then begin handing out copies of Cynthia’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rose.” As we are discussing Cynthia’s poem, Tanya moves her copy to the side of her desk, opens up her notebook, writes “freedom” at the top of the page, and begins to write. I ask her if she would join us in talking about Cynthia’s poem, and she says matter-of-factly, “I have a thought.” When I ask Tanya, once more, to please give her attention to the poem at hand, she sighs and says, “OK. I don’t like part five.”
“What don’t you like about it?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”
I want to tell her that when workshopping a piece, saying that you did or didn’t like something “just because” is a literary trespass, language that is simply forbidden. But how that sounds in my head makes me squirm. This kind of internal squirm, some days, makes for few classroom explanations and even fewer classroom rules; while another part of me wonders if this space of slight lawlessness is the truest gift I bring.
We continue to move gently into the territory of constructive criticism, with its potential for quicksand and flesh-eating fish. We are discussing whether the word “rose” seems repetitive, or if using the word more sparingly could let the image speak for itself, when Cynthia begins reading another poem from the packet I had handed out at the beginning of class. When I ask her what she is doing, she looks up, surprised, and says, “I wrote the poem the way that I wrote it for a reason, because that’s what I was feeling, so that’s how I’m going keep it. I’m not going to change none of it.”
“But don’t you think how people receive your poem is important?” I ask, straining.
“Yes, but I’m not going to change it.”
“It’s not that we’re asking you to change it, and of course you don’t have to change anything, but it might help to hear how you could make what you are doing in this poem clearer and stronger. We’re here to help you say what you want to say better.”
“But I said it how I’m going to say it.”
“You don’t have to change what you said if you don’t want to,” others start to chime in, and then Tanya, saddling up for controversy, says, “Why should she change what she wrote for other people?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Cynthia continues. “Then it wouldn’t be my poem anymore.”
“Of course it would be,” Sylvie says.
“No, it wouldn’t,” Cynthia answers.
“You don’t think it would be your poem anymore just because you took some of the suggestions that we made, the ones that you liked?” I say.
Cynthia, with defiant obedience, takes out a piece of paper and says, “Look, I’m going to write down what all y’all tell me. But I wrote what I wrote for a reason.”
“That’s right,” says Tanya, looking at me. “You stick to what’s true for you.”
This comment travels up and back down my spine. It suggests that workshopping a poem is some sort of siege I am mounting. By defending Cynthia’s poem exactly as it is, even with stanza five, she seemed to be defending something far more precious than thirteen ways of looking at anything. The idea that she needed to defend herself from me at all causes my face to flush.
“Why am I here then?” I ask, suddenly throwing up my hands and letting my pen go in the process. “If you don’t care what other people think about your work? Why do I drive an hour and a half if it offends you when people respond to it?” I continue, going too far, looking first directly at Cynthia, and then at each woman in the room. “If we aren’t open to what other people think, then why gather together at all?” I am angry as I say this, but it won’t be until the drive home later that night that my anger dissolves into shame.
Charged silence hangs in the air. Cynthia picks up her pen and wiggles it at me in a gesture of obedience that is somehow the most defiant thing I’ve ever seen. She then juts her hips forward, stares at me unblinkingly for a moment, and says, rigidly “I’m open.”
*
Driving home that night, however, I was chilled by the way Cynthia had begrudgingly agreed to accept critique from the group, as if surrendering all that was sacred. And that she had assumed this faux stance of openness, not because she saw some benefit in doing so, but because she thought she should defer authority (in this case, however reluctantly: me.)
Yet I was equally uncomfortable with the possessive way many of the poets in the workshop resisted group feedback. I saw this as an individualist attitude, which, cultivated and strengthened by the prison environment, served only to separate the women in a false sense of safety—an attitude which ironically left them without the skills to contribute to and benefit from any community, and effectively left them vulnerable. At the same time, I could empathize with this resistance to a group dynamic and how passionately they defended what was personal. How fully, how vehemently, how understandably they expected this personal space to be attacked.
Considering the environment in which the women were writing—one where everyone wears the same colors; is subject to the same regimented tasks, counts, and reprimands; where each woman receives a number in replacement of her name—it made total sense that their writing—if little else about their current lives— would take on a heightened sense of identity. In an institution whose main function is to strip a person of her individuality, was it fair to ask these women to selflessly offer up their poems to the group? Yet, on the other hand, how was living in defiance and fear of a group dynamic conducive to a return to society?
*
I walk into the basement room the next week to find four women missing, and one new eager-looking woman whom I have never seen in my life. Before leaving the previous week, I had looked into Tanya’s eyes and asked, “Are you coming back?” and she had responded, offended, “Of course I’m coming back. I like this class.” Jokingly I had asked her to shake on it, and she had given me a firm handshake which I still feel fluttering in my palm as I take attendance. Cynthia tells me that Tanya and Tanika are playing basketball in the yard, even though they had both said they were sick that afternoon. “They aren’t sick,” Cynthia says, shaking her head. “And Linda?” I ask, gripping eight copies of the poem she has given me to type up so we can workshop it.
“I don’t know where she is,” Cynthia says. “She said she was coming back.”
“And what about Sheila?” I ask.
“I really don’t know,” she says.
My lesson plan, which I had composed with the intention of bringing some life back into the group after last week, now seems silly in my hands. It seems sillier to resent women who have decided to play basketball on a summer evening rather than sit in a fluorescently lit basement and write about freedom. I take a deep breath, smile at the women who are in the room, and we all begin with a free write.
The concept of letting the mind ramble on the page with permission to be silly or “wrong” is something that I cherish for its ability to break down false hierarchical structures between teachers and students, release possible tension in the room, and find hidden gems of thought. There was one woman in the workshop who, whenever I started a sentence with “Now we’re going to . . . ” would finish it with “Free write, Lil?” When I nodded in response, she would groan and sigh and take out her pen, ripping a page from her notebook loudly, sigh again, tap her foot, look at me, and whisper, “How long are we going to do this for?”
“Five minutes.”
“OK, Lil, OK. You’ll tell us when five minutes is up?”
“Yes, I’ll tell you.”
“You’re not going to go overtime?”
“No, don’t worry.”
“OK,” she would sigh, and then begin to twiddle her pen and tap her foot and stare at me with a loving disdain on her face, and I would look up from my page and draw a line from her pen to her paper with my wide eyes, and she would widen her eyes in return and say “OK, OK” and start to write. A minute later, she would look around at the others, and then back at me, whispering, “How much longer?”
The thing is that, before her release, this young woman had been the most committed student of the workshop for three years, and, by her final class, she had filled a three-ring binder with hundreds of poems. When she had an idea for a poem, she would sit down and write it, rarely going back a second time or crossing words out to replace them with others. For her, the act of writing seemed to be an act of transcribing a poem that had appeared in her head. Picking up the pen and putting it on paper was a matter of convenience; an act translation more than inspiration. For me, the act of picking up the pen was where the writing began, and rarely any sooner. To unleash the flood of language onto the page is and always has been the only way for my thoughts to take shape.
The free write recognizes how much power can come from the act of making yourself vulnerable to language. I have come to understand, that for many people, resistance to a free write is a mistrust of that vulnerability. “I don’t have anything to write about” is a common plea. “Just begin,” I answer, “and things will come to you,” promising them that what comes true for me will come true for them too. Yet the free write draws on a certain fearlessness, a trust that we will float and not drown if we are willing to leap into the sea of language.
Some of the women continue to pause and reread each line of their free writing, some tap their pens and stare at me, and some alternate between the two. After doing this for months and months, one day, when the free write time is up, some of them don’t stop moving their pen from the page, and when they do, they look back over their writing as if peering with wonder down a very deep well. One woman raises her hand to share, after a free write session, and says, “I have no idea what this means, but ‘Cast off castaway, this is my island.’ ” She then stares up at us in amazement and, looking back down at her paper, reads a little louder. “‘The silver bird died, but kept on flying.’” Thus, a group poem begins, with these lines as the refrain. We recite this poem in our final poetry performance that spring, and use bits of these lines in the printed collection of our poems. The hot pink photocopied program for the event will read, in big letters, ‘This is My Island.’
*
When the time is up, I ask if anyone would like to read. Sarah offers to go first, and we follow in a circle, reading aloud. While Sarah is reading, Sage continues to write. While Sage is reading, Sarah is rereading her own work. While Linda is reading, Sage is writing, and while Cynthia is reading, all the women are looking at their papers.
“OK, we’re going to do that again,” I say. “And this time I want each of you to slow down, enunciate, and speak up. While you are listening to each person reading, I want you to write down lines and words that stick out to you.”
This second time around there is lots of “Girl, you have GOT to slow down” and “Wait, wait, wait, what did you just say?! I LIKED that.” When each reader has finished, we give her back the words that she has given us, reciting little poem scraps off our pages. We give Sarah these snippets of her writing: “Spin the bottle/ who’s to bother?/ Carry me across the field to where my children still care/ Why swallow the golden arrow?/ It’s done, we both have guns/ Knocked on my knees until they bled/ Behold my old broken bones have gained some strength.” Sage is given “Emotions are momentary/ they call me ‘sometimish’ because my feelings about you may vary/ I am a human, not a mannequin/ and I’m feeling some type of way/ I need to impeach it/ Is it me or life that did me so wrongly?” For Linda: “Let’s take this word friendship to another place/ no matter what goes on in life, friendship is a word you shouldn’t have to say twice.” And for Cynthia: “I have to start some place/ to forgive myself/ Don’t ever fall victim to a yes ma’am/ that prison within.”
*
By having the class share their free writes and letting everyone respond to what they heard, I witnessed a form of workshopping that was more casual and supportive than the formal analyzing of a single poem we had attempted the week before. It allowed us all to say to each other, “I heard you,” without the more threatening addition of “This is how you should change what I heard.” I also noticed that having the women listen for favorite lines to write down made them much more attentive and energized. Suddenly, the sharing of a poem was not only an oration but an exchange. There were common favorite lines that each of us took from a piece of writing, and this was cause for discussion, but the lines were speaking for themselves and the discussion was evolving naturally. Together we were taking a closer look at language that had sparked us and, during those moments, no one seemed to feel the need to defend that language as her own. Instead, the swirl of words in the room became a fluid movement of overlap and convergence; a signature of shared life rather than the fragile and rigid boundaries of personhood.
*
We then try an exercise of taking a poem, in this case Anne Sexton’s “The Break,” and decide upon 20 words that we, as a group, would like to take from the poem to use to write our own short poems. I thought this would be an interesting technique to try as a way to depersonalize our attachments to language and ease into group writing. Essentially, we are all working with the same materials to experiment with how much variety can arise out of a single, structured form. When we are finished, we put our little poems on the board side by side, and are delighted to find how different they are, yet how nicely they stand together as a whole.
As a closing, we begin to brainstorm words that we associate with freedom. I introduce the brainstorm exercise of “mapping” (beginning with a word in the middle of your page and allowing yourself to free-associate from one word to the next) to create a word bank for everyone to pull from in their writing during the week to come. We put a slew of words on the board. Sitting back down in my chair, I ask them, “So freedom can mean a lot of things, huh? But, really, what does it mean to you?”
A discussion ensues in which Sage almost gets out of her chair because she is so sure of her point that freedom is always the possession of power. In response to every example that arises she says, “See? Power. You are free when you have power.” Linda leans over her desk, shaking her index finger and smiling, “Don’t try to put me in your little grid, baby.” Sarah is saying in a number of ways that freedom is not an external, nameable, quantifiable thing, and keeps holding onto her chest, gesturing to what is inside of it. Cynthia is appalled that any of the others are trying to tell her what freedom is. Soon they are all talking at once, pointing to the board and then back towards each other, constructing examples and counterexamples, using each other’s words to recycle and reshape in order to better to suit their own stance. I sit without saying a word.
As class is coming to an end, I hand out packets with “Some Advice To Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison,” a poem by Nazim Hikmet (“I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass/ ten or fifteen years inside/ and more —/ you can,/ as long as the jewel/ on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!”), and a collection of different quotes about freedom I have gathered from various writers, philosophers, and politicians. I then ask them to pick a quote to engage with if they wish, as well as 10 words from our list on the board which had been added by the person in the room they most disagreed with. This elicits some grunts and smiles, and then it is time to leave.
*
Teaching a creative writing class in a correctional facility has taught me to examine the connections between the making of art and the making of any democracy. Both ask us to be passionate in contributing what we know, and, at the same time, to work to respect more than fear the things that we do not. Both ask us to recognize the fragile dance between individuality and community, objectivity and subjectivity, safety and vulnerability; our larger social spaces and the punch of individual drive. And what better place to appreciate this dance between personal and collective truth than through the porous membrane of art? What better way to make sure “the jewel on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster”? I haven’t found one yet, which is why I keep coming back, driving an hour and a half each week to sit in a room where I am vivified and confounded by the blurred space where my definition of freedom leaves off, and someone else begins.
Works Cited
Hikmet, Nazim. “Some Advice To Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison.” Selected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967.