Lyric poetry carries the expression of the solitary human voice. Does it then follow that solitary confinement is a school for great poetry? This episode brings together a group of interpreters who learned in prison to hear poetry’s “call.” Learn from Senator John McCain, playwright and activist Anna Deavere Smith, poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Li-Young Lee, and four exonerated prisoners about poetry’s special resonance for those behind bars.
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.
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