Best American Poetry Blog

Prison Poetry: What The Hell Am I Doing Here? [Hannah Wehr]

If one year ago you had told me that I was going to end up in any sort of teaching capacity job, I would have :

1) Laughed at you

2) Spilled my rum and coke on you
3) Asked you to buy me a sandwich (I wasn't into buying my own food back then)

But as life (that scampish tart? that tartish scamp?) would have it, i have become what I have always feared: a teacher.

But it gets better: I teach for free. Yea, getting paid for working is overrated. And I teach poetry. Useful skill indeed. To violent incarcerated juvenile felons. 

And all sarcasm aside; I love it with my entire heart facsimile. 

You see, I have never been the caring type, at least not with children; I do not stop in grocery stores to bend over strollers and make idiotic noises. When a young man at a cocktail party told me, "You would…uh… make a great mother…I…uh….you just seem like that type of woman," I put my cigarette out in a tray of crab puffs and replied, "You know some women like men to piss on them, other women want nothing more than to breed. I am neither one of those women."
I have been described as 'Most Likely To Eat Her Young' by a friend who knows me better than anyone.

 


So to find, several months later that I had become a poetry teacher at four maximum security juvenile facilities throughout Orange and Los Angeles County, I was flabbergasted at myself. But if I have learned anything while riding the derailed train that is my future, it is that the time to make up your mind about people is never. And this includes yourself.

I have two passions in my life: poetry and pit bulls. My heart is, I thought, a duplex with room for only my dog Zissou and Anne Sexton. Both of these of are the underdogs of their respective fields. Poetry isn't just the black sheep of the literary family, it's the huge fucking monster of the family. Poetry has earned itself a rather unseasonable reputation as being nothing but the botched abortion of a poorly written suicide note and a junior college creative writing course, haphazardly delivered by troubled youths who refuse to read anything besides Poe and lurk around coffee shops, scaring away the soccer moms. Poetry, like pit bulls, has fallen victim to stereotyping; an ignorance driven, reductionist philosophy for the lazy and the fearful. 

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I have been lucky enough to have met over the past few years a myriad of talented and motivated poets, who are as excited as I am about hot wiring spoken word and by injecting a new life and energy into poetry, help to overhaul its public image and foster a renewed respect for the beautiful and intricate art of it.

And where better to start that process than with another highly misunderstood, horrifically stereotyped, and generally disregarded population; the convicted juvenile felon.  

D-Day: October 17th, 2008. Myself and three other poets walked into a classroom, surrounded by high barb wire gates, and met the eyes of twenty young boys in jumpsuits.

My heart was no longer my own.

Tomorrow…..Prison Poetry: They Are Going To Let Us Out, Right? (AKA: Bring Your Own German)