In August of 1994, President Clinton’s Crime Bill destroyed the monies designated on a nation-wide basis for all Prison Education programs. The Federal or Pell Grants were for books; without books, like it or not, there are no programs. Those monies constituted less than one percent of all federal funds designated for higher education and were beginning to offer proof, at least in the program of which I was a part, that this form of rehabilitation might be the cheapest, most far reaching yet devised. For a man like Kenneth, these programs opened up a new world and offered a restoration of chances, not just for himself personally, but for ourselves. He literally devoured the readings offered to him, as if they were the nutrient he’d been waiting for, and began asking for compilations of myths, stories, and legends that would demand further study. He went to William Carlos Williams’ Imaginations in hopes of finding direction. His collection of first poems based on his experience as a “grunt” in Vietnam offers little comfort. Instead, what is given is a transmission so deeply formed and composed that the reader becomes inextricably shadowed by the living arrangement of things which at once possess and bind us to their crisis:
resemble so much
nerve endings.
Fleshy,
raw exposed
seems inevitable
they’ll blow
someday
This thing about honor, less clearly defined:
Honor is the
sight of red-gray matter
sickly falling
in small jellied
clumps
from the waist
of a mango tree
II
9th century
china.
Honor is …
There is no ornamentation here, nothing unnecessary. The
detail of parts, the breath-by-breath construction of the poet’s awareness and
how he directs this language toward an actual act of seeing and how that act
attracts reality, offers us no escapable device. At the same time, through his
rigor, he sounds out “This thing about honor” far more intimately than the
policy arrangements of an “honor” that brought him to stand inside the “sickly
falling” clumps of his and our condition of shattered minds that can think up
no more than an industrial future whose central jewel is prison. Kenneth also
anticipates and answers Robert McNamara, who In Retrospect says, “… Obviously there are things you cannot
quantify: honor and beauty, for example …” McNamara’s precious order and
distance become an even more realized distortion before the account of this
poem and its beauty of first consequences that cannot be impeded, nor will it
succumb to the lures of the obvious where a whole geography, to the men who had
to slog through it, became know as the “slab.”
beyond print, and the
11th brigade
was on
Red Mountain
less than three days
found members
of an ambushed
squad
staked to the ground,
bound
hand & foot
left by
departing
NVA regulars
who had neither time
nor-
to deal
with captured GI’s:
admonished them
tucked them away
for safe keeping
fate’s a bitch
ain’t it?
the grunts laughed.
Kenneth wrote about these poems, “I am attempting to
discover what LINE is, what SYLLABLE is supposed to be; the above is a
reflection of the exploration. I think I do very much want to write, but my
problem is separating ideas from things — and where does the medium lie, for
the sake of poetic creativity, between those extremes?” Perhaps in hoping to
“tuck” this man, and others like him, in a penal banishment, we can contrive
relief, or failing that, the vague symptoms of reassurance that instruct us
that Kenneth’s presence and worth as a man doesn’t matter. His poems tell us,
however, about a vacuum off contrivances
and dismissals that rule us in their despoil.
[This
excerpt is from David Matlin’s Prisons:
Inside the New America from Vernooykill Creek to Abu Ghraib, Chapter IV:
Nerve Endings. His masterful study is described by the publisher, North
Atlantic Books, as follows: “This powerful exposè
reveals how America's ailing prison system undermines the public trust. For ten
years, David Matlin taught at a maximum-security prison, where he confronted
daily the nature of society, crime, and violence. Based on his experiences,
this book examines the history of prisons in the United States and shows the
terrible price a lethal combination of degradation, abuse, and corruption
inflicts on inmates and society as a whole. Matlin argues that privatization of
the prison industry has led to irreversible tragedy both at home and abroad,
weakening our national identity and shattering public trust in the American
justice system. Engulfing and enraging, the book challenges readers to take a
long look at the culture of crime and punishment.”
The poet’s actual name, presented
here with the pseudonym “Kenneth,” is William Blount.]
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