Poems and Prisoners and Death and History

This poem, “My Grandmother Plays Emily in Our Town,” by Rachel Richardson, is very beautiful. I found it while reading “Shirt,” by Robert Pinsky, which Alex Pasternack quoted in his piece about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911.

And then, because I was interested in the person who wrote “My Grandmother Plays Emily in Our Town,” I came across “Escape Artists,” an essay on writing poetry with prison inmates, which is very much worth a read:

Leading a poetry workshop in such a place — a total institution, to use the anthropological term for a community defined by its complete isolation from the outside world — actually requires very little, in my experience. In showing up, the facilitator cracks open a door to the outside. In coming every week in good faith, he or she values the words of the people inside. These may seem small gestures to people who have the privilege to come and go as they please, to choose how to spend their days — but aren’t these gestures the foundations for any relationship, with people or with a poem? You show up. You listen. You open yourself to whatever you might find.

What’s nice, too, about “Escape Artists” is her suggestion that poets operating without the strictures that confine actual prisoners might benefit from some of the exercises and devices she uses with her students. Try it! Especially form. She quotes that wonderful Paul Muldoon line: “Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.” Maybe not a sonnet, but have you ever tried a sestina? They are so hard, and so rewarding. I have never forgotten this beautiful sestina I read in my college poetry group, inspired by “My Funny Valentine.” Write poems! I don’t write poems much anymore, except for, right, joke poems about current events, because a) I am not that good and b) I do not have a lot to say of deep emotional import, which is 99% of the good poems. I’m reading a book right now in galley form about just the summer Sylvia Plath was at Mademoiselle, and I don’t even like Plath as a poet, but she had so much more to say and feel than I ever have. Which, I don’t know, right, I’m a pretty happy person, and probably, if she had her druthers, Plath would have chosen to be a happy person over being a poet, and there are loads of happy poets, but I don’t think I have enough deep feeling to pull it off anymore. Even looking at my college poems, I feel like I was a crazier and darker and deeper person then, and now I’m more “la la la.” I don’t know. Are you more normal than you were ten years ago? Whatever normal means to you, of course.