San Quentin, California
December 22, 2004


Dear Claire, 

I’m really glad to be in touch with you again.  It feels like so long ago when I was living in that little room in the back of your Santa Cruz house, when we were swapping cigarettes (we’ve both quit, yes?!) and watching late night TV.  I remember one station ran a political biography on Bob Dole and you were all pissed off.  You said something like, "Damnit, they’re actually trying to make me like the guy!"  It’s been about 10 years since then, and I’m happy to be rereading your plays, poems, and essays.  I wonder if I would have pursued poetry if we hadn’t met.  I love my work and the circle of people I’ve met because of poetry; I owe a lot of this to you.

And I’m a mom now.  Una’s always in the backdrop wanting me to read Fantasy Beasts again, "inside out" her dress, or just hold her. I know you raised three boys pretty much on your own and kept writing.  Is that part of the reason your work has often been overtly political--your boys?  (I’m thinking particularly about the Susan B. Anthony and Amelia plays, the more recent "Open Letter to John Ashcroft" and poem "To Laura Bush.") I’ve noticed a different level of concern for social justice since having Una; I can’t tell whether it’s because things have gotten so fucked up and far to the right or whether having a child has been the key factor in my shift in perception.  Probably both. 

In the midst of the "war on terror," I’ve been questioning again the efficacy of poetry in the social sphere, at least in this country.  Here we are with a second term of George Bush, wars raging, the death penalty firmly in place in California, creationism on the rise; the planet’s dying.  In a recent note you wrote, "it is our mandate as poets to record it all.  We must go out into the world and feel the pain and then write about it." I agree, but to what end?  I’ve been thinking about the many poetry anthologies:  Hamill’s Poets Against the War, Forche’s Against Forgetting, Hoover’s Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Waldman’s Civil Disobediences, Sloan’s Moving Borders, this one.  When all’s said and done, do these books serve the same social function?  It’s unclear to me.  Is protest in poetry record-keeping?  I’m haunted by the recent events in Ukraine.  Incredible. Where are our masses?  I know change is incremental, but I’m losing faith. 

A good friend, Richard, is certain that the arts are inadequate tools for any real social change.  When talking about artists, he likes to say, "Resist bourgeois scum in their ruthless search for authenticity," and, "Your consciousness is formed by withholding food for money."  Part of me thinks he’s right.

These questions remind me of when I first starting teaching in the prison system. You’d given me some amazing lesson plans and a lot of reassurance.  You showed me the Godzilla poem you wrote for the guys getting out.  I had unreal expectations.  I actually believed then (and to some extent still believe) that the arts could change the inmates’ lives and that it would help keep them out of prison.  I thought that the William James Association’s Prison Arts Project mission statement was above reproach: that creative risk-taking and high quality arts instruction would offer incarcerated men and women the tools to stay out of prison and use their creative energies in socially constructive ways.  I had an outstanding group of poets at DVI; they’d been together for years, were excellent writers, and many of them had release dates.  When I was teaching there I was in the second trimester of my pregnancy and hopeful as hell.

Now it is clear to me just how naive I was.  Although I still absolutely believe in the restorative abilities of the arts, I’m just more realistic about the social and economic realities that the incarcerated face. Just a few months after their release, all but one of the five inmates from that DVI class that had been on the streets were all back inside.  Soon after finding this out, I read Angela Davis’s "Masked Racism:  Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex:"

"Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category ‘crime’ and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color.  Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages."

One of the best writers in our group struggled with reading. Another wasn’t receiving treatment for mental illness, because he was suspect of the system.  One of the guys told me that he hadn’t had a visitor for five years; he said, "mama doesn’t like to drive in fog." Several of the inmates were admittedly "self-medicating."  These men were / are up against far more than my poetry class might remedy.  Yet I’m sure art does change the quality of a life.  I wouldn’t be able to live here at San Quentin (benefiting from an institution that kills people), if I didn’t know it to be true.  I still teach in prisons.  But is there something more useful I should be giving the guys?  Did you have these feelings in Soledad?  Because I understand that poetry can be limited in its ability to alleviate suffering, I am committed to other forms of community involvement.  And I realize it’s not an either/or proposition, but the questions remain.

Related to these questions of poetry’s influence are questions of language.  Several mentors at SFSU insisted that poetry cannot / must not be decorum on culture.  They discussed the tyranny inherent in structures of language and syntax; they showed how words, their histories and common use, serve to perpetuate oppressive understandings of experience and the world.  We read Celan.  We read Oppen and Stein.  We read Brathwaite, Olsen, and Cha, writers all trying to reorder language, break it, expose its agendas and misgivings.  Then there are my first loves:  Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, T.S. Eliot, Frank O’Hara, and Walt Whitman.  Informed by these projects, the manuscript I’ve been working on for a while now, Curren¢y, struggles to be a book that my brother can read and grok while also taking on the project of challenging common diction and the development of meaning.  That’s the poetics I’ve been working under.

On the page and in practice, I read in your work a conscious decision to use everyday language as a pragmatic tool.  It is as if you are working within the system to change it.  You read in community centers, in art studios, in libraries, in national readings, in pubs.  In your workshops, you skillfully deconstruct a wide range of literary experiments in all genres, but continually you come back to questions of "access."  As in your poem to Laura Bush:

"Who wants to hear about the Mother of All Bombs / which we will drop on the mothers of Baghdad? / There are better things to write about. / Laura Bush tells us to go away, / If we can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. / Laura Bush, first lady librarian, knows about these things / knows that poets have always been the canaries in the coal mine / And she knows the poets are lining up now singing their heads off / because they know / what’s coming down the shaft just a few feet away..."

I read this poem with the clients in Napa and you were their hero!  One of the therapists said, "This is how I feel, but I didn’t know how to say it."  Your writing reaches people.  Remember the scene in Harold & Maude when Harold says something like, "You really love people, don’t you?" And Maude says, "They’re my species."  There’s this tone in your writing.  Like Whitman, like Oppen, you are talking to your kind.  And the work is brave. Not just your diction, but also the content of your work is essential. Recently a great poet in SF read and when I asked her how it went afterwards she said she could tell that her peers were a little uncomfortable with her references to motherhood, as if it isn’t hip enough, isn’t "in."  She felt that talking about raising children makes the work "lite" somehow in their minds.  In your work, you champion these issues.  Begin and end with them in the most common language. 

I feel a bit anxious about this discussion because it flirts with a "schools of poetry" rehash.  I saw a lot of "I’m an experimentalist--have a cigar" attitude in graduate school.  And an equal amount of disdain from writers who thought some poets "needed composition classes."  In the years since college, it has been odd and disappointing to realize that there are nationally recognized poets whose ideologies supersede their abilities to communicate with writers not of their ilk.  Weird.  Ultimately, I’ve learned that the categories aren’t so useful and that Harryette Mullen is right on when she says:  "aesthetic and political opposition to the status quo do not necessarily go hand in hand, nor are they mutually exclusive. I'm interested in the shared aspirations of social and aesthetic movements that envision a better world. While I celebrate the differences that create distinct aesthetic preferences, I seek to overcome the social segregation that enforces aesthetic apartheid." Since my work has changed radically since we worked together and because I never explicitly asked, I’m wondering: what is your philosophy of language?  How much do you consider audience in the making of your poems? Does a concept of readership affect the diction you choose?

Well, it’s late.  Una’s sleeping, but is an "early bird."  It kicks my butt when she gets up before 7:00 a.m., and I’m fully expecting this tomorrow.  Just a last thought.  Steve and I have a bookmaking friend named Beth Thielen, (do you know her from Arts-in-Corrections?) who’s a visual artist and has worked on edible art projects. One of the things she has done is to letterpress words into organic produce while the plants are still young and watches them distort and expand as the vegetables grow. A while back she stamped a Chris Desser quote, "larger than our commerce, larger than ourselves" into lettuce leaves which she later ate and served to friends.  Maybe on a much grander scale this is utopic.  To feed ourselves completely.  Any suggestions on how to get there?

I love you Claire.  Hope these holidays are the best yet.

Yours,  Dana






Paradise, California
February 14, 2005


Dearest Dana,

What a blessing to be part of your wonderful project and how proud I am to work with you individually.  Oh yes, I do well remember when, for a short time, you lived in the little room in my garden, six blocks from the beach in Santa Cruz.  What a joy it was for me, the mother of three grown sons who never had a daughter.  How I loved seeing you come up the deck stairs in the morning to the main but tiny house, saying to me, "I slept so hard last night."  Even then before you had allowed yourself the title of poet, you were speaking in poetry.  Even now, when I sleep well, I think of you, and I say also to myself, "I slept hard." And yes, it's been many years since I gave up smoking, although when I quit I thought I might never write again.

There is so much I could tell you about poetry and what it has meant to me in my life. I think though, I want to start by saying every poet has his or her view of what it means to be a poet.  Each of us differs from the other, just as each painter, or photographer, or sculptor differs. I do not think there is one right way to look upon the reasons people write poetry or the way poets use language.

For me, my poetry is and has always been the lens through which I view and interpret the world. But I find this time now extremely difficult.  We live in an age where the horror of the tsunami is broadcast into our homes with visions of Asian children drowning, and we live with the daily count of death in the war.  Somehow, being an American poet during this time becomes the heaviest of burdens.  I see my mandate as a poet to record.  It is what I must do.  Without words or comments on the pulse of the world as I see it, I feel like a camera, unused, gone dead in a drawer. 

I am so very troubled by your friend Richard's comments about art and how it cannot affect social change.  Perhaps he himself is not an artist to make the accusations that "consciousness is formed by withholding food for money."  I find that such a curious statement, perhaps because I was a child of the poor. I wonder if this comment by your friend comes from his experience, either by practicing art or by living poor.  I am a poet and I have gone without much money much of my life. There are many things in life I can live without, but I cannot live in this world without poetry.

Poetry has always been a powerful tool for social change. Why is it so many countries under oppression imprison their poets?  In 1988, a year before the Tiananmen Square Massacre, I had the pleasure of meeting two young poets from China.  As they shared their poems with me they told me that probably by the end of the coming year they would be imprisoned.  Perhaps the Chinese government saw it differently than your friend Richard.  Perhaps social change can result from a poet's words. 

I remember reading my anti-war poetry on the steps of the quad at San Francisco City College during the Vietnam War. A well-dressed clean-shaven young man held a "cigarette pack" up to his eyes and took my photo with a hidden camera. Perhaps also our own government thinks poetry might cause social change.  Maybe the reason Laura Bush turned away the Poets for Peace from the White House was because she feared the power of the poet.

This of course brings up your questions about the work you and I do in the prisons.  I felt so sad when I read your words about how "naive" you think you are when you grapple with the hope art will change inmates’ lives.  Of course it changes their lives Dana.  I have sat in hundred and hundreds of poetry workshops with inmates in almost every maximum-security prison in the state of California.  I have worked with the most hardened of criminals, with murderers and rapists, with drug dealers and smugglers.  I have written poetry with the women of Chowchilla prison, with women who killed their abusive husbands, and the young mother who accidentally killed her own baby. I have sat behind the razor wire in Juvenile Hall and written poetry with kids as young as nine years old who have done horrible things in their short lives.  I have given out probably a thousand pencils and a tower of blank paper to the trembling hand of the offender who is drying out from drug overdose, alcohol abuse, or trying to settle into his or her state-issued psychotropic drug prescription. 

From what little I know about the parole system and the difficulty parolees have finding employment and housing, when the only employment they ever knew was pimping, prostitution, or drug sales, I can't even imagine how poetry could affect the recidivism rate. What poetry can give them however, is a way for once in their life, to write about their fears, to finally put down on paper those terrible feelings of loss and waste and despair. 

So many times over the years I have had new inmates walk into my workshop and say, "Well I'm not a poet, but I'd like to sit in and maybe learn how to write."  I always tell them. "By the power vested in me, I now pronounce you a poet." In my deepest core of beliefs I know I am right. Everyone who wants to write poetry is a poet.  The call comes to them like music running through their minds.  The words haunt them.  They just haven't had the chance or the permission to spend time on it.  I feel very strongly about this. Some poets are blessed with more talents than others, but if someone feels the desire to sing, they should not be silenced simply because their voice is not as perfected as another's.  When we are writing poetry, we are singing the songs of our hearts.

I think the greatest gift we as poets can give to those behind bars is their dignity and the opportunity for them to use words as a path to their deepest feelings.  I remember one specific day in Soledad Prison. An inmate I will call Dave, about forty years old, Caucasian, exceptionally handsome and muscular, attended the workshop for months and just listened.  He was convicted on a drug charge and close to parole.  Then he began to write love poems to his wife.  Week after week, the poems got more and more amorous, how he would take her in his arms finally, after five years.  He showed us pictures of her, a pretty little woman smiling at the camera.  Then about a month before he was released Dave came to class and his face was all swollen. It was obvious he had been crying. He sat silently and no one asked him what was wrong. That wasn't our role there.  After about an hour Dave said he had to read something.  He got up in front of that class of the men in blue, his peers, those hardened convicts, and read a poem about how he had lied to all of us about his wife, about how she had divorced him a year ago and then married another man. As he read his hands began to tremble and the tears flowed down his beautiful face.  And he kept reading.  He read about how his mother had left him when he was a child and how his father beat him and told him he was stupid and ugly. As he read, he cried and cried and the tears just rolled down his face onto his poem, and the men in that class sat as still as stone. Dave struggled with his words and his pain.  Then he finished.  He put his paper down and looked out over the silent class.  I took a moment and then said, "What you just read to us took more courage than anything you will ever have to do in your life.  I commend you for your strength."

Then something beautiful happened, a very old African American convict who was incarcerated for several murders walked up to Dave and put his arms around him and held him, and said, "It's okay to cry man.  We're all crying in here."  Then one by one each of the students stood and applauded him. Some went up to him, slapped him on his back or gave him a hug.  When he finally went to take his seat my own face was covered in tears.  He stopped by me and said these beautiful words, "Why weren't YOU my mother?"  In a strange way, at that time I felt like his mother.  Before he met me he had never written a poem in his life.

This thing I know.  When those inmates are with us in our workshops, we open up the doors of their minds.  When they return to their cells they walk with dignity. They carry their notebooks and their pencils like medals.  In the dark of night they write, in the middle of the day they write, when they cry they write, when they are afraid they write, and when they are angry they write.  Writing gives them the tools to cope with their lonely and terrifying lives. We cannot take the burden of guilt and pain away, but we can help them lay the burden down for just a little while.

While we are there with them, working on their words, giving them the freedom of their minds, welcoming their thoughts, building the bridge that only poetry can build, they are model inmates. They are not interested in running with the bad guys in prison.  One inmate told me that groups of inmates in prison are called "cars." He said there's the druggy car, the weight lifter car, the card-playing car, the gangbanger car, and then there's the poetry car.  He said all the inmates in the poetry car stood together in the yard and read poems to each other.  He said no one ever challenged them or threatened them.  He said the poets were the scribes of the prison, that for a pack of cigarettes or a couple of candy bars or some top ramen, they would write a personalized mother's day card for an inmate to send home or a birthday card or love poems.  The poets are treated with respect and they act with respect. 

I know I have not answered your questions about my philosophy of language.  I do not know if I have one.  I am the daughter of a Portuguese longshoreman and an Irish housewife.  I am a second generation American. I have never been to college, although by now I have guest lectured in many and taught for UC Extension.  I got married when I was eighteen and divorced when I was 37 and have never been married since.  Poetry has been my crutch, my spirituality, my savior, my in-road and my exit.  I cannot imagine a day in my life without reading a poem, anyone's poem.  My house is filled with poetry.  I write the way I speak and I speak the way I did when I was raised on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Poetry has played the most important role for me in plays. The highest compliment a theater critic can give me in a review is that my plays are poetic. And yes, I do think of the audience when I write. I think of them standing on the docks of the city. I think of the winos I knew as a child who leaned against the buildings on my way to school. I think of the inmates who will never see a night sky except through bars.  I think of my children, my grandchildren, and the grandchildren they will have eventually. I think of the day they will go through my papers and read my work.  I want them to understand what I say, and I want to make them proud. I want them to write poetry also. This is the gift I want passed down through my ancestors.

I am honored that I had a role in helping you toward your path as a poet. Many blessings to you and your beautiful little Una. What a lucky little girl she is to have such talented and loving parents.

With loving thoughts,
Claire






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