Pegasus in Prison

I

How significant it is that in prison parlance the term of sentence is known as ‘time’ In comparison, we on the outside ‘have no time’ because we have filled our moments with such a number of things that the luxury of contemplation and the opportunity for creation are often crowded out. In prison, time is something to be ‘done,’to live through moment after tedious moment, something which must consciously be turned from present into past. The wrestling with this time often results in unrest and the squandering of emotions, but Don Quixote, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the History of the World have enriched our literature because their authors were sentenced to do time. Admittedly, Cervantes, Bunyan, and Raleigh are exceptions; wherever they were found, wonder would grow. The only generalization we can draw from such cases is that the enforced solitude, the reiterative routine, the self-communion which is inflicted in any prison, may be turned into a creative rather than a destructive force, and an individual who possesses talent, latent and unsuspected though it may be, has the opportunity to become an artist.

It was with some such thought as this in mind that I pulled together, out of the three hundred women at the State Reformatory, about fifteen to be members of a poetry club. Interest was the only prerequisite; discrepancies in age, nationality, formal education, and I. Q. were ignored. For the past four years the class has met twice a week to read, write, and criticize — not always the same members, of course, for we are constantly recruiting and releasing, but with the same continuity of interest and purpose upheld by young and old, by those doing a short bit of a year or two and those who have long stretches. The reading we do is wide, ranging from Chaucer to MacLeish; the writing may be bad or fair, but we strive to make it our own; and the criticism is spontaneous, both of our own work and of that of others.

Since all judgment is the expression of the sum of one’s prejudices, hereditary, environmental, and personal, a consideration of the cultural background of our students gives a better understanding of their approach to art. Formal education left most of them ‘between the dark and the daylight,’and thrust them forth into a world in which the literature consisted of tabloid newspapers, confession magazines, and drug-store novels. Where the printed work left off, the movies took up their social education and spread a sentimental veneer of ready-made mottoes, catchwords, and attitudes over the ugliness of daily, dingy life. ‘A mother can do no wrong,’‘Home is heaven,’ and ‘Poetry is anything that rhymes’ are tenets which serve as pigeonholes into which experience must be fitted neatly. In class we stress, not the ‘proper’ response, but the truth and sincerity which must be the basis of all art.

A new group I initiate with ballads, for they like something that tells a story, and the simple rhymed stanzas fit exactly their notion of poetry. Classes are never lectures, but roundtable discussions, so my students will mention, sometimes recite, the ballads they know, — ‘Frankie and Johnnie,’ for example, and ‘The Dying Cowboy,’ — and we will find certain similarities between Casey Jones and that other folk hero who did his duty, Sir Patrick Spens. The romance of literary ballads— ‘The Highwayman,’ ‘The Seal Woman,’ ‘The Harp Weaver’ — appeals to all and stimulates their imagination to see subjects and themes in daily incidents. After the spring flood of 1936 there was a regular deluge of poems of rising water and acts of heroism, with the themes taken from newspaper accounts, letters from home, or vivid imaginations. Class discussions ramble, and the students become acquainted not only with Childe Waters but with new terms: metre, iambic, quatrain, free verse. We define, illustrate, and talk about these technical terms until we have a toehold of knowledge to start our own writing.

At the same time we study a simplified A B C code for apprenticed versifiers. Never can the mere names of technical terms or the knowledge of the work of others make a poet; there is no substitute for inspiration; but a knowledge of the history, development, and craft of verse writing is a signpost directing us along the right road. Just what it is that makes a poet no one can say beyond the vague generalizations of ‘talent’ and ‘sensitivity’ and ‘perception.’ Women in prison have recently been through a tense and terrifying emotional experience; the realness and the bitterness of it are still gashed in their memories. By turning emotion to an expressive form the festering hurt may be cleansed and the healing started, for the release which comes with sharing an overpowering experience is a well-known religious and psychological fact. A strong, clear, and single emotion forces those who are not used to writing to keep the end rather than the means in mind, thereby reaching the goal in the most direct way; simplicity, achieved by art in a more conscious group, is here achieved by instinct. Nor is it only these subjective factors which aid the prisoner, but the environment of orderly living, the discipline of actions and reactions, and a routine which allows time for thought and solitude.

II

Though these women are amateurs at expression, most of them have had a variety and intensity of experience, and their themes can best be found in their past or in their immediate present. Prison life is serious; the loneliness, the compulsion, the separation from loved ones, the regret, are real, and when put on paper they are convincing. After a strenuous day’s work, the door of the solitary room is closed at seven-thirty and a prisoner has time to remember and muse. Thoughts of resentment and bitterness add bit by bit to the tension of unrest until there must be release of some kind — it may come in tears, in a curse muttered or shrieked, in a smashed window or a door kicked down. Once such musings were turned into words, and the words entitled

MEDITATION

A prison is built on a foundation of tangible facts; not only the bricks and bars, but the sentence imposed by the court which judges ‘guilty.’ The facts of the life of the prisoner will be written up by the social worker in a case history, the staff will know what she has been and what she has done, her background, her heritage, the ‘why’ of her incarceration. But none of these stripped facts, nor the results of a psychometric test, will reveal the depth of her imagination or the vagaries of her dreams. Her personality is more than the sum of the facts about her; it is also her thoughts, her attitudes, her ideas.

The social worker may state that the prognosis for a certain girl on parole is poor, the work officer may say she is slack, but if she can express herself as this girl has done, she is, for the time being, an artist, and out of the wreck of her life she has been able to create something living and vital — and successful.

In the corridors the unnatural silence of a line of women waiting to march to meals or the footsteps of a solitary worker returning from late duty in the hospital convey a feeling of desolation that is caught in the following poem: —

WOMAN OF LONG AGO

It is not only the inescapable present but also the remembered past which calls forth the lyric mood.

A HAUNTED HEART

Who can say which is more real at a given moment — the yard within the prison walls or the ‘ringing plains of windy Troy’? Not for all, but in varying degrees and lengths of time for some, the wider world of imagination may be superimposed upon daily life to extend the horizons of thought far beyond the bare walls of present experience. A single plant on the window sill of a blank room is a dramatic and vital force, and as its vivid color is far removed from the monotone, so is the expression of its beauty above the level of the day.

Life is as varied and eventful as our natures make it; a unique experience will be commonplace if we allow it to be, while imagination can make memory a lyric force, or turn a daily sight into a delightful simile.

Each of the following three poems is a first attempt at verse. The girls who wrote them are young, have longed for lovely things and never had them, but when they compelled themselves to observe and re-create the beauties they saw they found that for the moment they were no longer poor. It was not the desire for wealth that society had condemned in them, but the means they took to get it. In class there is no talk of morals, and the values which are stressed are artistic ones, yet these three girls in this first experience of striving for a different kind of success have realized new values.

NEW MOON

SUMMER WIND

IT’S SNOWING

III

For verse written by class members there is absolutely free choice of subject matter and form, but the suggestion is often made that the students adopt a certain pattern or theme in order to understand more fully the work of others whom we are studying. Spoon River Anthology is popular. ‘That stuff is real,’ they say, because they know that life is not a series of sunsets and springs, but neighbors gossiping, human relations painfully strained, hidden vices, and sordid struggle. Kagawa’s Songs from the Slums they read with the same understanding, for the miseries of the poor are universal. Parts of The Uncelestial City repeat almost too exactly their own struggles; they too have committed the crime of being ‘foolish, young and pretty, and absolutely broke, like Kitty.’ Longer poems, John Brown’s Body, Conquistador, The Dauber, or a play of Shakespeare they will follow with growing interest week after week, always savoring new themes, new rhythms, and new horizons. As a rule the students remain unsophisticated in their technical appreciation, always preferring simple, direct stanza patterns and modern diction. Sonnets remain too intellectual for the class, classical allusions go over their heads, and the music of words must ‘have some sense to it.’

One week the class theme was a dramatic incident in poetry, and the students for several days tried to isolate an incident of everyday routine and give it significance by their interpretation. One student wrote of the lowest form of life in the institution, the ‘rat,’ one who ‘squeals,’ and from an incident known to all the members of the class formulated her attitude into this

PRIMER OF ETHICS

Out of the serious stuff of daily life even here there is some humor to be unearthed, as in the song to a pair of worn-out State shoes — plain black oxfords sans grace, sans individuality, sans the pride of personal ownership.

MY OLD SHOES

Even the performance of one’s regular job, the task assigned by the institution, compulsory and unremunerative, is often the burden of song.

DIRGE OF A HOSTESS

HOT DAY ON THE FARM

COUNTING TIME

Most of the thinking which goes on in our institution concerns itself with three subjects: freedom (When shall I be out?), privileges (How can I get them?), annoyances (How they irritate me!). I was wrong in calling it thinking; it is rather chasing the tail of a feeling round and round. Sometimes a student will weave the threads of anxiety and hope into a pattern, which is an excellent problem in self-discipline and self-analysis.

LOOKING BEYOND

THIS Is How I FEEL TO-NIGHT

A FRIEND

FOUR WINDOWS

These poems are stamped, as Cervantes’s phrase has it, as ‘just what might be begotten in a gaol.’ None of them would have been or could have been written outside the institution.

Yet when we think of their authors we must remember them as temporarily members of the poetry class, soon to be members of the community. The definition of poetry, as given by Eastman, and the theory of rehabilitation are arrestingly similar; both are ‘the consideration of ends yet unattained.’