Elisa New discusses Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem with Senator John McCain, playwright Anna Deavere Smith, poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Li-Young Lee, and exonerated prisoners from the Innocence Project.
Interested in learning more? Poetry in America offers a wide range of courses, all dedicated to bringing poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.
I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
In the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.
[…]
Text of “To Prisoners” by Gwendolyn Brooks taken from To Disembark, Third World Press Foundation, 1981.
US Senator
Actor & Playwright
Poet & Attorney
Poet
Cell at the Eastern State Penitentiary, now a museum, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Corridor, Eastern State Penitentiary, now a museum, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
North end of Cell Block "A," Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
John McCain with squadron. John S. McCain, III Collection (AFC/2001/001/07736), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
