"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
My prison pen pal "Conway", who is serving 25-to-life for receiving stolen goods under California's three-strikes law, has been reading Dag Hammarskjold's Markings. He sent me these quotes to help me as I struggle to sort out true faith from legalistic obedience:
"A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a person to assume responsibility. While performing the part which is truly ours, how exhausting it is to be obliged to play a role which is not ours. The person you must be, or appear to others not to be, in order to be allowed by them to fulfill it. How exhausting but unavoidable, since mankind has laid down once and for all the organized rules for social behavior....
"How am I to find the strength to live as a free man, detached from all that was unjust in my past and all that is petty in my present, and so, daily, to forgive myself? Life will judge me by the measure of the love I myself am capable of, and with patience according to the measure of my honesty in attempting to meet its demands, and with an equity before which the feeble explanations and excuses of self-importance carry no weight whatsoever."
Conway
also enclosed the poem below, "Comfort-ward". It was written on the back of a document titled "Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation INFORMATIONAL BULLETIN". Conway re-titled it "Fractured Form o' Bull" and extracted a found-poem from it by underlining selected words and fragments of words. For instance, part of the original text (with Conway's emphasis added) read:
...An inmate who is deemed a program failure by a classification committee is subject to having his/her personal property/appliances disposed of inaccordancewith Departmental procedure.
3315(f)(5)(P) Violation of subsection 3323(f)(6) shall result in: 1. Loss of visits for 90 days, to be followed by non-contact visits for 90 days for the first offense. 2. Loss of visits for 90 days, to be followed by non-contact visits for 180 days for the second offense. 3. Loss of visits for 180 days, to be followed by non-contact visits permanently for the third offense.
No text was deleted or changed, only misplaced by the publisher...
Thus, this section of the found-poem would read something like this:
...who is deemed a failure subject his/her person disposed in a dance with mental Violation Loss followed first Loss followed by offense followed by non-contact permanently misplaced...
I sent Conway some writing prompts and resources about Oulipo. Experiments with found texts may seem like a parlor game for academics, but when texts are generated by the oppressor and used to shore up a dehumanizing system, these literary methods reveal their politically subversive potential. I look forward to seeing what he does with these exercises. Meanwhile, enjoy his latest poem:
Comfort-ward
Timelines encircle this prisoner's eyes mirroring shelves of eroded bone while arrest was left unexpressed.
This stone tongues talk has become useless. I would shave my head, if that could convey, all the words left unsaid.
This struggle has deposited scars but awakened me cleared by stars-n-gripes though my world may appear to be fallen stripes;
2/5/2010 6:03 PMAlegria Imperial wrote:
Thanks again for this post, Jendi. I've been a fan of Conway since his first poems you posted here. Perhaps because I, too, am imprisoned in a way as so many others I find in his poems some kind of release and healing, even. Amazing how spaces between words enhance the power of words whether or not the author intended it. That must be the soul's doing (poet) and the other soul catching it. Talk of 'soulforce'--Conway's being in prison must be where he had to be for him to burst into cosmic bits of thought and poetry. Thank you for nurturing him as you do me. Reply to this
3/26/2011 7:20 PM
Jendi Reiter wrote:
Thanks for reading the blog! He's mentioned you often in his letters. He tells great tall tales about the adventures you all had as kids! Reply to this
3/29/2011 4:46 PM
Patricia Henry wrote:
Hi Jendi,yes we had some hard times and awkward situations where we didn't know if we would be able to survive.Right now,I am at the point of foreclosure,please contact at my e-mail address and I can you more info. Reply to this
3/31/2011 5:16 PM
Patricia Herny wrote:
Yes had many times when our parents had us doing odd jobs to get money for our family.There were many times when like the depression,I want to tell you more,but not here on the blog,contact at email. Reply to this
