On Teaching Poetry to Women in Prison

The Rumpus has an essay about poetry behind bars.

From the story...

Going once a week to the prison with the student volunteers, I never really learned what the women were in for. They wrote poems, sure. But mostly we played absurdist games or used lines from published poetry to get them started. Women came and went, leaving little vignettes about love lost, limericks about their apartments. But when I began to spend every day there by myself, the deeper stories emerged.

One of my students, barely out of her teens—white, with wire glasses and dishwater blond hair—looked like she should be sitting on a dorm couch eating chips. When she came to the workshop, she wrote vivid little poems about stabbing a man—a murder she had, in fact, committed. The social worker told me that this inmate derived sexual gratification from violent talk, but the other inmates said she was just hoping to get sent to the mental hospital where the food was better, the rules more relaxed. Another of my students burned a house down that contained her two children. Another woman, with a Pegasus tattooed across her back, ran over someone in a car. The brightest and most charismatic was a young black woman with muscular arms who named herself after a popular item of furniture. She had a powerful speaking voice, a thirst for radical cultural theory, and made the blue government-issue shirt look sexy.

Whoever told me about this young woman’s double homicide (an inmate? I can’t remember), said that she had killed two women of a rival gang with her bare hands.