What It’s Like to Read Poetry in Prison

illustration by Bonny Berry

San Quentin, I hate every inch of you. ... I’ll walk out a wiser weaker man.
—Johnny Cash, “San Quentin”

As you drive up to San Quentin penitentiary, the view strikes you like a Christian inspirational postcard. All the divine and majestic elements are present. Sunbeams punch holes in the gray cloud sheets. Stubborn waves crash frothy fists into jagged rock. Green hills roll back like perfect Astroturf over dinosaur carcasses. However, the lighthouse intended to symbolize infinite forgiveness has rifle sights in its eyes. Barbed wire fences cut the grassy hills in arches like Caesarian sections, and even if you don’t believe in a god, the front gate could pass for the mouth of hell—brick-lipped, with a placard on the left side like a cold sore. It announces the date this place was built, 1852. San Quentin is one of the oldest buildings in California, and among the oldest prisons in the United States. I’ve heard that before it was a formal reformatory, the site was a mission built by the Franciscans to house “uncooperative” natives. Even if you think psychic phenomena are a result of excessive psychedelics, you can literally feel the pulse of all those years. It’s like walking past a graveyard were all the residents were tortured on the spot before they were buried.

When I heard about this gig, to host and perform at a poetry slam for the inmates, my jaw dropped off its hinges. I will admit to the visions of Johnny Cash-badassness dancing through my head, but this was more than a fetish trip for me. I have had the tremendous fortune of never being caught committing a jailable offense, and I presume that luck is as much of a finite resource as anything else. Have you ever wondered if anyone who served time for a crime you got away with was cursed by your good fortune? I’ve had five friends who served long slices of their lives in county jails, and three who lost years to full-fledged prisons like this one. None of them ever received a visit from me. I wish I could pass it off as not wanting to see them through the safety glass in the visiting room, but it was more that I did not want to see my self reflected in it. I was, in some ways, scared straight, or at least careful. But never repaying or at least thanking those that I have learned from seems blasphemous. I meditated on all of this as I rewrote my bio, sliding San Quentin between a three-minute HBO appearance and three years of work in East Oakland schools.

At the front gate, all belongings are subject to search and seizure. A guard carrying more weapons than he has hands leads us. He is required by law to inform us that in the unlikely event we are taken hostage, the state of California will not negotiate a prisoner’s release for ours. As he watches our little rainbow coalition of poets and teachers turn bone-white, he jokes, “Don’t worry, we haven’t had an incident here for what... three weeks?” This is when I begin to really realize the seriousness of this situation. HBO’s depiction of prison life is apparently about as accurate as its impression of a poetry reading.

We make small talk while they check our IDs. It turns out there was actually a riot here a few weeks ago. It started over an amount of heroin so small it could barely get one man a buzz. Sudden as lightning, 200 men, in one way or another, were all fighting for it. The guard says that now is actually a very safe time. “We’ve had the place locked down for a while, so it fucked up the drug trade. Eventually the higher ups tell their guys to be cool so business can resume.”

To walk up onto the yard is to be asas a fresh-cut fish. If you ever have the opportunity to watch 500 convicts turn and look at you all at once, don’t. Every illegal thing I have ever done flashes before my eyes, and I imagine every birthday after my 18th spent in 12-by-6 hollowed-out brick. I start to play the mental movie of what prison life would look like for me. I figure that once the Aryan Brotherhood cuts the Hebrew tattoo off my arm, I should try to get transferred to the gay unit and hope to meet someone nice.

The classroom where we are to hold the slam apparently used to be the gallows. The prisoners shuffle in. There is a profound tension about them. It is the opposite of paranoia; it is the certainty that, yes, they are all out to get you, or are at least watching you. A few prisoners come up and shyly ask if they can participate. We, of course, tell them they absolutely can. A few minutes before we’re scheduled to begin, a younger inmate walks toward me quickly. He looks familiar, but not placeable. His state-issue blues hang on him loose and all-consuming as regrets, but the only way to make the smile on his face any bigger would be to animate him. It is a stark contrast to the palpable exhaustion in the creases of most of these men’s faces.

“Hey, what’s up man?” he asks. “Not much,” I respond. “Don’t you remember me?” he says. The mousetrap gears of my brain snap, and yes, I do. His name is David. He was hanging around the small circuit of Bay Area poetry slam venues about a year ago. I saw him read a few times and went to a poetry slam he threw. I wound up being one of the only people there, but we had a good conversation outside while waiting/hoping for more folks to show. I didn’t ask him the what or why of how he got here, only the when of getting out. He said about a year and a half. “It’s great to see you though,” he says. I return the courtesy, but still feel like an asshole.

To say a poem to any room is a frightening experience. You are as naked as a stand-up comic, with no instrument to hide behind, but your objective is to do more than just make people laugh. If you are audacious enough to call yourself something as anachronistic as a “poet” in the 21st century, people should (and do) expect a certain level of depth. To say a poem in front of a roomful of convicts is to present depth to people who live at a pitch so low most of the world can’t hear it. When someone who has every reason in the world to be miserable laughs because of what you say, it’s like hearing someone breathe after you’ve given them CPR. If I could bottle that feeling, I’d quit every drug cold turkey. OK, maybe not quit, but definitely cut back.

The poems that the prisoners read are as varied as any othermic. My favorite line of the show was by a 50-year-old founding member of the Crips: “Most people can never think of the last sunset they saw, but that’s because they trust they’ll see another one.”

As I walk away from San Quentin, sap runs out of my face like I have something to cry about. At the end of the day, I get to go home to my futon and weed habit, while David eats a dinner cooked in rancid butter and Prozac. So I thank god for traffic jams and long lines at the supermarket, and I hope I’m not deemed ungrateful for being spared a cop walking into the wrong room at the wrong time.

Even after I get the smell of Bugler cigarettes and industrial detergent out of my nose, I still get rattled when I see pop-culture references to prison. A remake of the ’70s screwball penitentiary comedy The Longest Yard came out about a week after the gig. I am acutely aware of jokes equating prison with anal rape. I will never look at policemen, “tuff on crime” politicians, or every minute of my life the way I did before my prison visit.

As you drive away from San Quentin, the cities of Oakland and Richmond are children holding huge bundles of Christmas lights. The water in the bay is black as wrought-iron bars, and if you are in cellblocks A through E, your window, if you have one, will never face the moon.

Geoff Trenchard owns a black suit he wears for just such occasions.