These are really just bright, joyful poems.
I'm sorry.
[LAUGHTER] So this next one is--
I'm going to skip this one just because it's more prosy
and it's sort of tracing.
I can share my screen.
I basically identify three architects of the prison--
Descartes, who defines consciousness;
Linnaeus, who basically applies the gender binary to nature
so that man can fuck it; and Benjamin Franklin.
And I want to move on to Benjamin Franklin
because that yanks us into the present.
Trigger warning.
The images in the Benjamin Franklin poem
they're not graphic, but I mean, they were graphic to me.
There's a drawing of a torture device and how it's used.
And I could not eat that day.
So I don't know.
These images, this content is like, it's so much.
Let me share my screen.
Hang on.
There you go.
So this is the one I'm skipping.
I felt like I was too stuck in the past.
So I wanted to kind of show how these things
continue to produce the present in the middle as an interlude.
Actually I'm going to go over here.
"Architect 3."
"1776.
The birth of the United States is
inextricable from the birth of the prison
with the construction of Walnut Street Jail, built
to relieve overcrowding and inhumane conditions at Old
Stone Jail.
Men, women, and children are confined together
in common cells and subjected to public whipping or branding.
Illness is rampant.
Experimental isolation and labor begin.
America, the story you tell begins
in the red glare of revolution, freedom from empire and taxes,
but never with your revolutionary brutality,
driving innovation.
1787.
What will become the prison begins in Philadelphia
in the mind of Benjamin Franklin.
At the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating
the Miseries of Public Prisons, a group
imagines solitary confinement and labor
to encourage penitence and reflection.
First American, inventor of the lightning rod and bifocals,
you also imagined the modern penitentiary
as a Quaker monastery, and the unbearable
enforced silence of solitary confinement.
The trick of Enlightenment is how its sciences
rationalize atrocities in the colonies
but will be praised for the modern marvel
of the architecture.
1829.
Eastern State Penitentiary opens and receives its first inmate,
Charles Williams, burglar.
Light Black skin.
Farmer by trade.
Can read.
Sentenced to two years segregated confinement
with labor.
Would he be anything other than Black?
America's first penitentiary inmate--
a Black farmer who stole a watch, a coin, and a key.
The three things stolen from the enslaved--
time, compensation for labor, freedom.
The Pennsylvania system--
23 hours a day of complete solitude and silence,
prisoners are not allowed to speak or see any inmates.
Prisoners do low-wage labor such as shoe making.
Movement out of the cell requires a hood
to maintain anonymity in isolation.
Listen, the Earth is tense with memory, each tree a nerve
recording the history that will defeat history.
A gem of coal is a demon, a boll of cotton,
a reed of sugar cane, a tumor of gold.
Blue behind a gun.
The grid work that holds bodies.
We will begin again with a riot of heat to stay alive.
Kalief, I can think only of you.
The two years in isolation you survived
echoed in the two years of the first prisoner in the United
States, also in isolation.
The excruciating silences around you, the excruciating silence
you left behind, the silence of power and everything
we could not change.
1836.
Eastern State Penitentiary is completed
on 11 acres with recreation yards
and centrally-heated cells with arched ceilings, skylights,
and plumbing.
It becomes the model for prisons around the world and a tourist
attraction.
1877.
Four new cellblocks are built between existing ones.
No recreation yards.
1911.
Cell Block 12, three stories, 120 cells
is built wedged between the radial wings,
meant to hold 3 times as many prisoners.
The concrete cells have one small window.
By 1926, all outdoor space is replaced with three-story cell
blocks.
1933 to '34, prisoners riot over lack of recreational space,
low wages, and overcrowding.
Idleness exacerbates mental illness.
1961, cells are desegregated.
Listen, the Earth is tense with memory, each tree a nerve
recording the history that will defeat history.
A gem of coal emerges a diamond.
A boll of cotton, a reed of sugarcane, a tower of gold.
Blue behold blue.
The grid of redwood roots.
We will begin again, alive."