Poetry from the age of mass incarceration
This exhibition brings together 12 books of poetry by people who have experienced incarceration. Mass incarceration is a central, defining characteristic of the United States. Incarcerated people confront beatings and shootings by armed guards, poor medical care, forced labor, sexual violence, isolation and constant surveillance. Over two million people are incarcerated in the United States today, and millions more have been released from prisons and jails to new forms of state control, including crushing debt, disenfranchisement from voting, and strict probation and parole regulations. People who have criminal records experience legalized discrimination in health and welfare benefits, housing, employment and education. Michelle Alexander’s important book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Brown University’s “First Readings” selection for 2015) explains how mass incarceration institutionalizes racial violence and control, from discriminatory policing practices that have been upheld by the Supreme Court to racist sentencing policies and drug laws.
I gradually realized that I was not looking at some peripheral cultural phenomenon but something close to the center of our historical experience as a nation-state. At least from the viewpoint of the people creating these works, America is itself a prison.
These 12 books, and many others by writers who have experienced incarceration, deserve recognition, not as “prison literature,” but as central works in the history of American poetry. The work is too diverse–in form, subject matter, vocabulary and political content–to be defined by incarceration. It would be difficult to find a group of 18 American poets with more divergent poetic styles and personal histories. Many of these poets have had successful careers in the arts, including Etheridge Knight, T.J. Reddy, Jackie Warren, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Daniel Berrigan, Carolyn Baxter and Paul Mariah. They are poets, artists, educators, playwrights, publishers, spiritual and cultural leaders, and political activists. By emphasizing the quality of these books, and their historical significance, this exhibition seeks to recommend them as important, central works of American literature. The books also offer essential accounts of mass incarceration as a system of state-sanctioned brutality and racism, and suggest modes of resistance, through ethical action and the poetic imagination.
Those of us on the outside must read and listen to learn about the conditions and effects of mass incarceration, especially because incarcerated individuals have often been marginalized and silenced. In prison, even the physical means to write may be absent, and writers who manage to publish are often unfairly dismissed by scholars and critics, including those who claim to support “prison literature.”
Reading poetry that records distinct experiences of incarceration may help us recognize the American prison system as a social and political emergency. Each of these books critiques the violent inequalities that support American state power, including mass incarceration. Perhaps when these poets, and other writers who have been incarcerated, receive the attention and scholarship they deserve, American poetry will have new models for a broader range of political positions, especially radical feminism and Marxism, as well as new models for political action and resistance.
Don’t be shocked when I say I was in prison. You’re still in prison. That’s what America means: prison.
ABOUT THE HARRIS COLLECTION OF AMERICAN POETRY AND PLAYS
The books on display are only a portion of the John Hay Library’s holdings of literature by authors who have experienced incarceration. These books are part of the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays, a collection of American and Canadian poetry, plays, and vocal music dating from 1609 to the present day. It is perhaps the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind in any research library, as its extensive holdings give equal recognition to both well-known and little-known American and Canadian poets and playwrights from the 18th century to the present day. The works by the authors in this exhibit are held alongside significant early American literature, hymnals, songsters, little magazines, contemporary fine printing, extensive collections on Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, women’s writings, gay and lesbian literature, modern first editions, Yiddish-American literature, and French-Canadian literature. For more works by the writers and artists in this exhibit, as well as other related works, please see the exhibition’s bibliography.