Disguised As A Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin

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Description

When Judith Tannenbaum last met with her poetry writing class at San Quentin prison, one of the most students commented, “Now I will come up with an assignment: write about these past four years from your perspective; tell your story; tell us what you learned.” This beautifully crafted memoir is the fulfillment of that assignment.

In stirring and intimate prose, Tannenbaum details the challenges, rewards, and paradoxes of teaching poetry to maximum-security inmates convicted of capital crimes. Recounting how she and her students shared profound and complicated lessons about humanity and life both outside and inside San Quentin’s walls, Tannenbaum tells provocative stories of obsession, racism, betrayal, despair, courage, and beauty. Contrary to the growing public perception of prisoners as demons, the men on this poetry class-Angel, Coties, Elmo, Glenn, Richard, Spoon-emerge not as beasts or heroes but as human beings with expressive voices, thoughts, and feelings strikingly very similar to the free.

Tannenbaum provides revealing views of conditions in the cellblocks and shows how the realities of prison life incessantly paralleled her own life experiences. She also relates such events as visits to her group by prominent poets (including Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz); a prison production of Looking ahead to Godot sponsored by Samuel Beckett himself; and the presentation of her students’ work to a class of sixth and eighth graders, who connected to the prisoners’ words by writing their own poems to the inmates.

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