Search

I wanted to prove to people that there was a body of poetry, not just a poem in the canon, but a whole body of poetry out there waiting for them; it was speaking to them and was, in a sense, modeling how they could tell their own stories.

This is  a big and funky and radical project. And so it gets walked out slowly. And one of the things I'm learning is that a lot of times we try to conceptualize this work having not brought anything to scale. I didn't understand what it meant to bring something to scale. But I think a lot of people who criticize different kinds of projects also don't understand what we mean. We’re putting a million books in prisons, and that's not even what I would imagine to be the kind of scale that I want a project like this to exist on. We want this Freedom Library to serve the same purpose as the libraries you find in people’s homes. 

“What Keeps Us: A Community Poetry Reading in Response to Violence” is about bearing witness. Community members are invited to read aloud a poem from the collection below, which I have curated in collaboration with the Poetry Daily editorial review committee, or to sit in intentional silence.

Sometimes when people ask me what it’s like teaching inside and I tell those people that a classroom is a classroom is a classroom, they follow up, ‘yeah, but are they any good?’ I get incredulous. Angry. I ask, why wouldn’t they be? Anywhere there are people beautiful art is being made. Why not prison? Poetry perhaps makes some of its most sense in prison – because people through poetry can take back at least a little bit of what’s been taken from them. But I understand the question, where it comes from. Poetry in prison is a bobcat traipsing across asphalt. When we build homes against nature, nature doesn’t go away. And when we cage people, despite the state’s best effort, people do not become anything less than people. Art doesn’t go away. I know I live in the city, but I know what came before the city, that it somehow still thrives here despite our best efforts to destroy it.