Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin

Preface to a new book forthcoming in September 2000 from Northeastern University Press (217 pp., $42.50 cloth, $15.95 paper)

Introduction

I walked into San Quentin for the first time in May 1985, to recite poems to a group of ten men. I walked out with an offer to teach. For four years — the first on a once-a-week basis, the following three for 20 hours each week — I was Poet-in-Residence at this maximum security prison. From Black Bart to George Jackson, a series of folk-hero-bad-guys (and a couple of gals) had shaped the myth of San Quentin. My students weren’t myths, though; they weren’t heroes or beasts. They were human. During my years at the prison, I watched these men live their lives behind locked gates and cell bars; what I witnessed, as well as what I myself experienced, taught me as much about what it is to be a human being as I taught my students about poetry.

As befitting a myth, San Quentin solidly sits on Point Quentin — a mile-and-one-half-long hook of land that juts into the bay called San Francisco to the south, San Pablo to the north. Saint Quentin was a Third Century Roman who was beheaded by the Gauls after having iron spits run through his body from head to foot. A white dove is said to have risen from his open throat and to have ascended toward heaven. The point and the pen, though, were not named for Saint Quentin but after an Indian warrior, fighting with the great Chief Marin, who led the Coastal Miwoks in their last stand against Mexican troops. In 1824, sub-chief Quentin was taken prisoner on the hook of land that now bears his name.

Many states and countries have successful prison art programs. Some states’ prisons contract with an outside firm to hire art teachers and buy materials. Others provide art classes through their prisons’ education departments. Elsewhere, teachers from local colleges give arts instruction inside prisons and jails.

In California, offering fine-arts instruction inside every state prison is the mission of a program called Arts-in-Corrections. A professional artist fills a civil-service position at each state prison; his or her job is to put together an arts program for that institution. During most of my years at San Quentin, this artist/facilitator position was filled by Jim Carlson.

Each artist/facilitator contracts with other artists to teach their art forms to prisoners. These artists are funded in a number of different ways. My own primary funding came from a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residency grant. The residency program of California’s state arts council funds long-term, in-depth projects not only in prisons, but in schools, hospitals, senior centers, mental institutions, halfway houses and the like. We artists design our projects in collaboration with the staff and clients we will serve. Grants are given for 20-hour-per-week programs that run for a maximum of 11 months of the year and are renewable for up to three years.

Those of us sharing art in prison, or any other social institution, join an existing cultural community. There has always been art in prison, and there are images and ways of rendering these images that are understood and respected by community members. As teaching artists, we honor the culture we visit and, also, teach: share the fine art skills and attitudes we ourselves have been given.

Of course libraries contain dozens of books written by men and women who served time in prison without the benefit of formal prison art programs. There are books by Doestoevsky, O’Henry, Martin Luther King Jr., Emma Goldman, Jacob Timerman, Thoreau, Daniel Berrigan, Miguel Pinero, Etheridge Knight, Irina Ratushinskaya, Nelson Algren, to name just a few.

Doestoevsky didn’t need Arts-in-Corrections. Others, though — people on the suffering end of most economic and social scales — have grown up believing that what they have to say is unimportant or will not be valued. In order for speech to occur, a person must not only recognize his or her own unique voice and particular thoughts and feelings, but must also believe that he or she has the right to express these perceptions. Programs such as Arts-in-Corrections can encourage this recognition.

For 25 years I have been privileged to share poetry with previously silenced people. My students have primarily been those whose voices are ignored or excluded from our larger social conversations. With young children, with prisoners, with youth at high risk, my job has been to encourage people to speak, and then to listen as well as I can. Such listening functions as a mirror in which my students are able to see a creative, healthy and wise image of themselves they may not have previously noticed or had noticed by others. After expression and reflection, our mutual task—my students’ and mine—is to put their work out into the world, to demand inclusion, to find room at the table.

There are no real jobs doing the work that I do, no full-time positions with employment security, health care and retirement plans. But there are profound perks. The primary of these is a "job description" that demands one ask people to shape their deepest vision into word, image, sound or movement, thus encouraging the birth of creative expression in another human being.

Because those of us sharing drawing or dance or dactyls or drumming with elders, kids, people who are in prison or mentally troubled or physically in pain or suffering from AIDS or near death, don’t fit into the economic mainstream, we’re often seen — we often see ourselves — as marginal and isolated individuals acting on our own. In fact, though, we’re part of a field. Bill Cleveland, former manager of Arts-in-Corrections, calls this field "art in other places."

Those of us sharing art in other places are not therapists or social workers; we’re practicing artists who know from our own personal experience that making art has the power to heal. We operate from a belief that creating is a human birthright given to us all—not only those able to attend art schools or writing workshops.

This country has never funded, supported or valued artists in ways much of the rest of the world has. Still — from the Works Progress Administration (WPA — a government program during the Depression of the 1930s, tied to FDR’s New Deal and designed to put artists back to work), to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA — operative from 1974 to 1983, with a similar goal of providing employment for out-of-work artists) to state arts councils and programs such as Arts-in-Corrections — we do have a history of paying professional artists to do public work.

In this dollar-driven, bottom-line society, value is often only what can be counted and measured. As Beth Thielen, former California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence at the California Institution for Women, said: "There’s increasing pressure now to prove that we make a difference, that we lower the recidivism rate. Can you imagine? It’s as if artists in hospitals were asked to cure cancer!"

James Gilligan (former Director of Mental Health for Massachusetts prisons) wrote, using words similar to Beth’s:

"Condemning" violence is as irrelevant as it would be to "condemn" heart disease ... We have to be willing to look horror in the face if we are ever to understand the causes of the human propensity toward violence well enough to prevent its most destructive manifestations.

We cannot "look horror in the face" if we keep repeating the same stories, based on the same myths, with the same conclusions. This book tells a new story, a story of the humanity shared by us all — convicts, cops, victims of crime and teaching poets. Inherent to this story is the paradox of exploring such a vision in a place like San Quentin.

The last night I met with my students, Elmo — who had been in our class since the very first session — said, "Now I’m going to give you an assignment: Write about these past four years from your point of view; tell your story; let us know what you learned." My response to Elmo’s assignment is the book you hold in your hands.

Original CAN/API publication: August 2000