10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 25 :: P.M. DUNNE on REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS

Week four of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Caits Meissner, who writes: “all of the writers featured in our final week are either in, or have served time in, jail and/or prison. But I didn’t choose them with the intention to illuminate the experience of incarceration — though many of the essays do, of course — or to advocate for anything other than the poets who spark up their blood. Quite simply, I invited this roster of writers because what I do with my days is think about, commune with and work with writers who share the condition of incarceration. It is part of my commitment to create space for these voices in the wider literary community.” Read the rest of her curatorial statement here. –EM

Any serious conversation about poetry today must include Reginald Dwayne Betts, a man whose no-nonsense verse reflects, as it once augured from a cell, the urgency of our era. His writings, though socially engaged, transcend race, gender, and nation to achieve something deeper than politics, something existential. This may seem a romantic platitude; as a prisoner, however, I can attest that his books, especially among the incarcerated, enjoy a status typically reserved for scripture, that they pass between calloused hands with silent, knowing glances, that they ferry neglected souls across the shores of Acheron, back to the world of the living. I can bear witness to the truth embedded in their pages, for I have spent many evenings under lamplight imbibing their cadences and tones, feeling an inscrutable combination of awe and envy pulsing through my veins. Speaking frankly, I find it offensive that this gifted freedom fighter — a mortal through whom poetry, ‘the art of revolution,’ redeems its divine breath, its power to animate ink — has yet to be crowned with laurel.

Yes, this is hell to hell. Dostoevsky.

What did he say? You judge a nation by

Its prisons. Had he said you judge us with

Our crimes this van runs off the rail and back

Into the Atlantic from whence we came.

But see he didn’t say that, and so what

Does all this say about America?

So many folks with control over our

Bodies. A public defender once explained

It perfect. He told me what we all know,

Said this is the business of human tragedy.

“The business of human tragedy.” I cannot think of a more apt term for the projects-to-prison pipeline, for modern day slavery. The best I can come up with is a tautology of an institutional agenda that still exists and reduces humans to ciphers (i.e., Departmental Identification Numbers) through an innocent seeming clause within the thirteenth amendment, which as many of us know abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. I imagine Betts, like his contemporaries, takes great issue with this exception (he is, after all, a public defender), yet, rather than detailing its effects (as today’s prominent coterie of armchair activists tend to do), he scrutinizes its cause, knowing full well that focusing on physical constraints, the outward manifestations of racism, often means disregarding the arguably more insidious fetters of self-hate; it is to remain a casualty of circumstance, to forget that responsibility and autonomy go hand in hand:

Back then it was

Always winter, always cold in the street.

My mind rabid with want for equity,

For dukey gold chains, Jordans, more.

The hustle courted us. And we were down.

. . . . .

I sold enough cocaine

To buy a legacy, but here, on this

My caravan to hell I am a man

With regrets, who just wants his body whole.

Although history has bequeathed to Betts, to many black and brown people, a horrid lot as stereotypes, as ‘animals and entertainers,’ he chooses to liberate himself in the present by acknowledging his past as a serf in America’s consumerscape — the era when he disowned himself and relinquished his freedom in pursuit of a fantasy. Social mobility, he realizes, if such a thing truly exists, occurs not through an accumulation of worldly riches but, rather, an investment in intellectual wealth. In a prison van, a twenty-first century slave ship, it occurs to him — while being transported, like a living corpse, from one “restless tombstone” to another — that the penal system, in order to keep running, needs him to forsake his sovereign rights and remain a victim in flesh and in spirit — like Dostoevsky’s ‘underground man,’ that is, a man paralyzed with shame and regret, indifferent to the future, to his potential as a responsible, law-abiding citizen — so he performs the most radical act imaginable for a person in his position, someone who knows “hell to hell,” and exorcises his demons, the fruits of capitalism, to make way for his true birthright, his VOICE. The State owns his body, but not his mind; it is his, he says, and his only. Nobody can take it away from him. Thus he depicts his spirit in the throes of a minor epiphany:

My body swaying back and forth, my head

A pendulum that’s rocked by the wild riffs

Of the dudes I’m riding with: them white folks know

You ain’t god body, what you commune wine

And bread? Where you from son? Red lines?

To what Onion? My eyes two caskets though,

So the voices are sheets of sound. Our van as dark

Inside as out, and all the bodies black

And voices black too and I tell my God

If you have ears for this one, know I want

No parts of it, no icepicks and no fears.

I don’t say shit. I sing my dirge.

Betts, some have argued, juxtaposes classical forms (in this case, modified blank verse) with vernacular to question his place as a black man in a white dominated society. This may be true. However, it’s just one reading, a popular — albeit surface-level — reading no self-respecting reader would ever content him or herself with. It’s simplistic, even condescending. (Betts knows who he is and what he stands for.) I may be an outlier in this, but I do not think his vision should be framed with an ideological lens.

I find it more sophisticated than the neat biography publishers and critics have tried to package him with to move units. (The literary world, like any industry, has its fair share of voyeurs, sensationalists.) There’s nothing simple or arbitrary about it — just consider the line breaks in relation to the contents, the synesthetic textures and poetic silences, the reappropriation of symbols, the unique turns of phrase, and it becomes clear that this poet, an existentialist in temperament, is a master on par with the greats (black, white, or any shade in between). His poetics extend beyond adversity and acrimony to encompass a greater perspective. One would not be wrong to read his ‘I’ as a ‘we.’

Still if you listened back when someone said

To let a hundred flowers bloom, and you

Were watching when the martyrs, the Malcolms,

And Kings and Fred Hamptons fell, you might think of

How democracy, like communism, ends

In a body bag for freedom fighters. Or

You might not care, you might have been like us,

Alive in the aftermath.

To be “alive in the aftermath” of slavery, of the civil rights era, is, for many, to subsist on dreams; it is to champion ideals, like democracy or communism, over people. It is to deny the beauty of our humanity. The events of the last four years confirm, if nothing else, that our country accepts oppression so long as it remains unseen. Since our eyes have been opened, however, we no longer enjoy the privilege of remaining blind. We must be willing to look and listen. We must be true to others or untrue to ourselves. Life is deeper than politics. When Betts pulls back the proverbial curtain, exposing the ugly machinations of the prison industrial complex, of America, when he presses his heart against our own, asking us to reckon with our indifference, to acknowledge the brutality in our silence, he does so only to show how alike we are as a people. That notion, according to him, is the starting point of recovery.

I once avoided writing about mass incarceration out of fear of being labeled a ‘prison writing,’ of being dismissed by the literary industry and treated as an outsider, but I’ve since found that the canon would be less inspiring, and much smaller, if not for the brave men and women who heeded the writer’s calling from behind bars, so now I write in solidarity with them. I look up to poets like Reginald Dwayne Betts as proof that the Muses don’t discriminate, that they never have and never will.

P.M. Dunne is the winner of 2018, 2019 and 2020 PEN Prison Writing Awards. He is a poet and novelist, who, while incarcerated, earned a degree from Bard College (Bard Prison Initiative). He divides his time between tutoring, reading strange books, and working on new projects. Upon his release he plans on becoming a positive member of society by earning his MFA, gaining employment as an editor and graphic designer, starting an avant-garde literary journal, and establishing a small press catering to incarcerated individuals. You can write to P.M. at: P.M. Dunne #11A0671 Eastern Correctional Facility P.O. Box 338 Napanoch, NY 12458.