Can Poetry Save a Life?

William Carlos Williams, in “Asphodel that Greeny Flower,” makes the confident and profound poetic statement, “it is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there.” In 1998, I did not know this poem, nor the fact a William Carlos William ever existed, but to be fair, I didn’t know any poems or poets when I entered Seven Locks Detention Center in Montgomery County, MD, facing a slew of felony charges. I was subsequently held in this county jail for almost two years trying to resolve the numerous cases against me before I would take a plea deal and be shackled and shipped on a Bluebird bus to the state penitentiary in Hagerstown, MD. Three months before my sentencing date, on a whim, I decided to escape the boredom of routine and signed up for a poetry workshop offered by a volunteer group of writers from New York City. I didn’t really expect anything from the experience, other than getting out of the block for a couple of hours. I mean, I was reading and writing prose to pass the time away in my jail cell, but poetry was an outlier, something not on my radar. I never attended a workshop of any kind, except in 1981, in a Cook Hall dorm room at Howard University when my man Dukes, who was from Miami, showed a group of young entrepreneurs how to cook powder cocaine into freebase rock.

Chasing Ms. Brooks

My initial encounter with Ms. Brooks occurred year two of an eight-year bid in a medium/max facility at Roxbury Correctional Center, Housing Unit III, C-Tier, Cell 17 in Hagerstown, Maryland, by way of a library cart. Up until this juncture in the stagnant day-to-day life of incarceration, I mostly read books like Convicted in the Womb by Carl Upchurch and Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall, memoirs that spoke to my “state” within the state of corrections, as well as the “state” I longed to leave behind. When the trustee rolled the cart in front of my cell during institutional lockdown—meaning, a dude got his skull cracked open with a SecureView RCA 13-inch television screen ordered through prison commissary and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital—I peeped Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks leaning against John Grisham’s A Time to Kill. I was intrigued, because I had not read many Black women authors up to this point—to be fair, I hadn’t read much of anybody, man or woman. However, I will confess at one time the only thing I did read was numerical ink printed on dead presidents. But the four walls of concrete that became prison demanded I read book after book to combat the isolation, the loneliness, the guilt of having invested so much in dead presidents, which equated to a life wasted.