For me, this is the end of an era. Of course, junior geezers like me know lots of era ends, and this is not the last, but perhaps (cue violin) the penultimate.
Since 2007, Etruscan Press and the Youngstown State University Poetry Center Outreach Program has brought authors from around the country and around the world to local high schools, elementary schools, retirement homes, neighborhood gardens, libraries, community centers, and prisons. With generous grants and donations, we also distribute copies of their books to thousands of students. This year, we brought two Etruscan writers to Youngstown, Sheryl St. Germain and Jeff Talarigo.
It’s amazing to see the interactions—but we all know this. We all remember school days when a“Fifty year old, smiling public man” (OK that was Yeats; we bring a rainbow of smiles) came to lecture and how dreamlike it felt. In those visits, I think of Gary Snyder recalling Zen talks by a Japanese Monk, “Remember those talks we didn’t hear, thirty years ago,” his friend asked? “I’m hearing them now.” We can’t change the test taking or administrations or apathy or violence or scanty resources. But sometimes I think, “thirty years from now…”
And this community involvement will go on. But one door has been closed. For the last ten years, I've taught composition and literature and creative writing to incarcerated men and women at Trumbull Correctional Camp near Warren, Ohio, and the Northeast Ohio Pre-Release Center--right under the shadow of Jacob's Field in Cleveland. Over the years, twenty-two writers have visited these classes. For me and for them, it's been a transformative experience. It’s changed my teaching, my vision of society, and of our world.
Unfortunately, YSU has discontinued its relationship with the Prison Program. I'm told that the reasons are financial. Never has anyone been sadder to end a prison sentence.
Here’s an essay from Phantom Signs about teaching incarcerated students.
The Warden of Dover Beach
“The sea is calm tonight.”
My arms glide over a sea of tranquil desks.
“Arnold opens with a simple statement. The evening’s weather report.”
I smile at bucolic rows.
“The poet lives seaside—so, ‘tonight.’”
Projected text dapples the whiteboard.
“But the next line,” my forefinger conducts, “is a musical phrase, introducing the tension between speech and song.”
The ceiling fan whirrs.
“So, rhythm.”
An ocean of silence.
“Not iambic,” I chop pentameter. “And rhymes don’t seem to fall regularly.” I pointer moony squiggles and recite, “The tide is full; the moon lies fair . . .”
I might as well be on the moon.
“It’s dualistic,” I peer down at earth. “Sung as measure—two beats, then three, with a strong caesura; or read as a sentence.”
From a distant shore, my bluetooth hisses.
“I don’t hear it.”
“What?” I cup my tinnitus.
“Rhythm,” the earbud hisses.
“Sorry?”
“Do Not Hear It, Man,” drawls the phantom voice.
“Right,” I sigh.
Most of this is happening in my head. Yes, I am in an empty classroom. I am in fact teaching “Dover Beach.” And these are the chestnuts I might offer if the auditorium were full: if the back-row sloucher’s T-shirt read, “fuck (1)it.” If the snapping in my ear was gum chewing. If the watery blue at the back of the room dripped from two hundred glazed eyes.
But it doesn’t and they don’t. No smart-ass T-shirts here, and gum—along with paper clips, spiral notepads, ink cartridges, the Internet, physical touching, first names, voting, and contraband—is banned.
I am hand-shadowing to a phantom class, hooked up to closed-circuit TV. A screen, wide as a frigate sail, stretches twenty rows away. The monitor switches between two blurry rooms. On the back wall of one room is a barred window. The other room is institutional gray. The figures in the windowed room are male; in the gray room, female. The orange tunics in both rooms are stamped D.O.C. I’m teaching Matthew Arnold to state prisoners.
I myself learned rhythm rocking to Clancy Brother albums, farther from Queens than the Aegean. And farther still—the Latin Mass, where rhythm was flensed of meaning; a dome infused with panoply and incense. Wherever sense is mystified—as in a come-all-ye or church liturgy—the measure is pronounced. In this class, a nineteenth-century pastoral poem rocking with tremulous cadences and turbid ebbs shouldn’t lack mystification. Still, the voice in my earbud doesn’t hear it.
Personally, I am unattuned. I included “Dover Beach” almost reflexively, the way one mumbles eight counting backward under anesthesia. Maybe these desiccated lines emit some glow. Maybe this chestnut is a talisman or vaccine. Perhaps the arcane diction and elusive references and labyrinthine rhymes might conjure escape.
“Try this trimeter trapdoor.”
“Slash with this slant rhyme.”
“Clamber up the naked shingles of the world.”
But no go. The voice in my ear does not hear it. No challenge. No whine. Not he won’t. Not he can’t. His double-barreled spondees: DO NOT HEAR IT, punctuated with the downbeat, “MAAN,” concedes no ground. He doesn’t lack the faculties to hear what I—The Maan—call rhythm. He does not hear it. He does not.
Of course no “Man” owns rhythm. It riffs and whirls transformed in every heart and body politic and tribe. One listener hears music; another, tinnitus. Me? In this empty room, I listen. Does a door inside the poem swing open? Do I feel a giddy twinge of the high nonsense? I could wade into these syllables, stripping off significance and context, fay as an aisling, dire as Agnus Dei: glimmering and vast in tremulous cadence.
Tonight concludes the first line; the second fair; then light illuminates; but in the fourth line cliffs stand. But do they stand when stand stands in for sight or might or fight or tight—rhymes that might close? I’m standing in a moon-blanched land. Where am I being led? The tranquil bay beckons a specter—silent, unresolved—Come to the window, sweet is the night air!” By whose command? In what signature?
Yet, when I reach toward the moon-blanched screen—silence.
It’s not just the screen.
In “site visits,” I pass through the checkpoints and am escorted over the courtyard grid to the classroom. Everyone shakes hands. We smile and josh. We take each other in. We are slightly amazed that we are real. But even face to face, we cannot really touch. We cannot wander from the squired paths, or share a meal or evening. I cannot stay one night.
So, I cue up YouTube. Rap rhymes with happening now; there’s no turbid, no was once; no sound a thought; no retreating, to the breath / Of the night wind.
On the cool blue stage above the orchestra pit, Def Poetry’s Mos Def calls out, “Queens, you made it through the metal detectors.” Cheers.
“The Bronx, congrats on parole.” Louder.
“The Planet of Brooklyyynnnn,” the invocation soars and the mic drops and the house explodes.
“Do you hear it now, Bluetooth?”
We are here together. Vibrant, in time. Speaking the self in great rondure and cohesion of all the ring of comrades that HBO pans before zooming on rapt faces going to dissolve. We are here as Georgia Me and Lemon and Black Ice give utterance to this as it is out there and we are all in it together and it flows over and through not like Sophocles and I breeze past rows of desks to touch the screen as Nikki Giovanni takes the stage. Then Rita Dove. Then Baraka. Amiri Baraka. The man himself.
Boo dee da.
Boo dee da.
Boo dee da. Be do do bee.
Dee dee dee dee. . . .
What I want is me for real
I want me in myself
and what that is is what I be
and what I see and feel and who is me
and what it is and who it is when it is
and who it is when it me is what is me
I’m gonna be here.
The thrum rises; rhythm obtains and prevails; righteous testimony is woven in dream language. This is how Homer sang—to a people entranced from forever to the now when we are all together. We is. Dover Beach is so far those whiteboard squiggles might be runes.
But it doesn’t last. Sound fails. The screen darkens. Gray brick and barred windows reemerge. Everyone is alone. No one is here ourselves.
The army captain who journals about the IED that sent him careening from Kabul to a home that had hardened into drear vast edges—he is not here now. The nurse hospitalized seven times: broken jaw, leg, punctured lung, broken eardrum, all from her husband of whom she writes that it is her daily task to disencumber—she has neither joy, nor love, nor light. The lifer whose son was recently sentenced to life has not certitude nor peace nor help for pain; the daughter who discovered her father’s hanging body walks as on a darkling plain.
Are these distances less fraught than Arnold’s beach? If rhythm is ebb and flow, if it joins and rejoices, does it not also define, and even exclude? How to explain this estrangement—not just the screen and empty classroom and professorial swagger, but all the pageantry of incarceration: the towers and bandoliers and panopticons. The walkie-talkies and key boxes; the codes; the muting of given names; thrice daily counts; the “Not Fit for Human Consumption” stenciled sacks; the violating frisks; the Abandon All Hope archway; the protocol whereby all visitors surrender cash and electronics and jewelry and license as if entering a medieval airport.
If we fear our neighbors, could it not suffice to attach ankle bracelets and install porch cams? Sentence us home to slum or suburb or prairie or high-rise. If we loathe a portion of ourselves, suffer us primetime. Serve justice on threadbare rugs; thaw Birds Eye; collapse us akimbo in a La-Z-Boy.
It is not fear or loathing only. The orange tunics and frayed drawstrings and rubber soles are not just government issue. They are the habiliments of discord. De-seg and seriaI numbers and cavity searches are not merely protocols; they are the signifiers of dissonance. The spires and cornices and searchlights, for all their anaphoric power, slur “is” and “us” to Bluetooth hiss.
Do the flickering whiteboard stanzas wall me in? Alone, I sing or pray in vagrant cadences. I draw a rhyme closed or fling it wide. Clancy, Christus, Arnold, and Baraka—the patterns spool and complicate and entwine. But these stanzas framed on whiteboard form a cage.
Why? The canon has no purchase here. There are no quizzes or finals. The text, I tell Bluetooth, is you: what you hear and feel as a poem moves before your eyes or wends into your ear.
No answer. Lines do not speak to my condition or to theirs—only the vastness of the gulf between. On whiteboard, even Baraka’s rampant scat-song is mute. Unsung, verses inter measured sound.
“Let us be true to one another,” Arnold implores.
Silence. Is anyone there? History says Arnold never lived seaside. There is no love nest, no mistress. There is no Dover Beach, except as Arnold opened a door and waded into the folds of a great girdle furled.
No Bluetooth either. I listen to the dark, where solitude is locked in solitary.
Does an unheard rhythm charm the time they serve?
“I’m so angry,” said one writer after visiting the empty room.
“What do you mean?”
She looked at me, then at the blurred screen. “Why are these poetry readers in prison?”
At the time, I thought she meant them.
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