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.
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Prose
“Dead Weight reveals things to us — things like us — in ways we’ve never seen”
-Ed Pavlić , author of Another Kind of Madness: A Novel
