So thank you, again, everyone, for amazing--
just amazing presentations of your work and just talking
about the issue of mass incarceration,
which just affects millions of people
around the world, specifically the United States.
One of the things that the Art for Justice grant,
which we want to also thank the Ford Foundation for granting
this opportunity to create spaces for poets
to create new commissioned work, is
that you were able to get a little bit of funding
for research and books.
And I don't know if any of you want to share about a book
that you read that was really central to the development
of the project, if that is something that you
want to share or talk about.
Yeah, I can grab one actually.
I'm just going to grab it off my shelf.
I have this really cool book called Troublemakers
that I got.
It's sort of visual.
Like, it's kind of like an art book
that documents the history of Chicago freedom
struggles through a particular lens of these people who
were like arrested and released and then tried to generate
a civil rights movement through colleges and stuff
in the '50s and '60s.
So the reason why this like--
I don't know-- so much of this thinking is really interesting
and relevant to me is because my father--
so I take care of my dad, who adopted me.
He's 81, so he was born in 1939, raised on a farm in Indiana,
and then joined the military in the '50s and '60s.
And so he was unable to participate in the civil rights
movement because he was in the military.
And they were literally like, you can't go to a march,
or else you'll be arrested by military police or whatever.
And so talking to him about these things, and the way
that he experienced or didn't experience
the struggle for civil rights and pushed
towards like assimilating or hedging his bets in the ways
that he could.
And the way that I kind of am a troublemaker.
I have my knuckles.
I have dope on my knuckles.
Like gang land landlord.
You know what I mean?
Like, we're so different and thinking about the ways
that even though we-- like our approaches are so different,
this act of troublemaking.
You know what I mean?
Like, trying to make trouble as a way of making
a space for freedom, like shaking shit up,
in the ways that we can.
I think that this book really--
I don't know it kind of spoke to me
and facilitated a lot of that conversation.
So I was really grateful for this book,
and I guess I should shout out the people who made it.
Erik S. Gellman, and it comes from Chicago University Press.
Thank you for sharing that.
I want to check that book out.
Vanessa, Raquel, was there any book that you felt,
or maybe even a lack of--
I mean, some of the other things that we've been talking about
is like a lack of information about some of these topics.
Yeah, I mean, since most of my project
is so engaged with archives.
Like, in terms of theory, I would
say I started with just like a theory of space.
I just wanted to understand what prisons were doing with space.
So I looked at Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Demonic Grounds by Katherine McKittrick
is like super fundamental to my work anyway.
And then I bought this book, Migrating to Prison
by Jose Cuauhtémoc.
I have to look it up.
But that actually really cracked open immigration policy,
and for-profit detention centers.
It's not even really an ideological issue.
It's just a way of bringing labor
into an institutionalized space.
And so the rhetoric enables this extraction of free labor
essentially.
And, yeah, I don't know.
The whole like system of capital underneath the prisons
became really clear.
Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang.
That one, I read through it really quickly.
I didn't expect because like, the title,
you're just like, oh, OK.
But I actually was just super engaged and energized
by that book because it was just--
that's actually the one that gave me
the idea for the graphs because she was able to create or set
the stage for how capitalism co-opts
different identity for extraction
and also targets difference in identity for predatory lending.
And if you're in debt, then that sets you up.
That makes you vulnerable to incarceration.
So it's like a whole--
and I love a conspiracy theory.
Not like the QAnon stuff.
I just really like the bare bones of the system.
Yeah, no, not that other one.
I know.
All of us were like, no, but we knew what you meant.
Yeah, yeah, no, I just like--
I don't know, just exposing the inner workings
of things that are just up in the ideological space.
So those were the texts that really got me through.
Thank you.
We got to screen share a text that was very central to this.
Wait, does this allow me to do screensharing?
You should be able to.
[INAUDIBLE]
If it's minimized, it won't like read the file.
You have to have the file open.
So, yeah, basically, since this is being weird,
it's an ethnographic study called, [NON-ENGLISH],,
which is how everyone knew it.
And it's put together by [? Maria ?] Macoso Aribia.
And [NON-ENGLISH],, and and it's very detailed.
It doesn't have any of the emotional anything that
would make--
that goes into the poetry obviously.
So in that sense, it is what it is.
It's an ethnographic study, but it's very detailed specifically
about [NON-ENGLISH].
The problem in general with Puerto Rico
is that the books that exist, one of them very important,
is a sort of memoir by Fernando Pico, who's
a very important a historian.
He's kind of an official historian in Puerto Rico,
and so I was very reticent to read this because I was like,
oh, he's kind of like bound up with the formation
of [NON-ENGLISH] in the way it's historicized.
He's like the historian they teach in schools type thing.
So I always was like, oh, but actually,
he spent many years teaching in prisons,
and it's a very useful resource.
And then there are some other books,
but I found them not as useful.
And of course, Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism
is an incredible book, and some of these
helped me frame my thinking and my approach.
But I wanted as much as I could to be close to the context
here.
So although that helped me understand a lot,
I wanted to think about also the ways in which things were very
much marked by colonialism in terms of circulation
and framing and how the prison system here was very
tied into the way the city was built, into the way San
Juan was built. And so the things that were similar,
and the things that were also different, and that I felt
required a very specific research
that other people had done.
And I took from and wrote poems about.
Well, you did an amazing job.
I'm going to do something a bit different here.
Normally, I ask questions to kind of spur the conversation.
But I think you all had a great deal of interest and sort
of questions about each other's work.
So I just want to welcome the opportunity
if there's somebody, one or two people that
wanted to ask about someone else's project
or what they read.
I obviously have a lot of questions,
but I also want this to be beneficial for you
all if you feel that there's something that you want
to bring up to another poet.
Yeah, I mean, y'all know I already fuck with y'all a ton.
So I'm like over here so excited about this,
but I mean, so one of the things--
I don't know if you were sitting down,
Vanessa, but I was talking to Raquel
about how they just like--
I got like a nice history lesson from them
right now, like a lot of new information
that was really exciting.
And I think as Raquel just said, like the closeness of context
that we all had really, I think was
so dope because it shows how the roots of this network are so--
Like no matter what, like you go deep through a personal level,
and you will get to a common shared root
if that makes sense.
And one of the things that really I
felt like in yours, Vanessa, was I learned so much
about a system that even like--
there's always so much more.
But I mean, the American carceral system and its impact
on Black people, I feel like that's a thing that I know.
And the way that you connected that first prisoner
to [? Kalif, ?] that was like--
and I don't know.
I just kind of wanted to ask about that.
Like, obviously, you sort of talked about having challenges
in terms of negotiating what you can talk about
and what you felt comfortable speaking about.
And I mean, I'll just be transparent.
I thought that it was done really well,
but I'm just like, that must have been such
like a wild thing.
One, to discover and uncover and to try to
think about how to share this with other folks.
It was so impactful to me.
I'd just love to ask about it.
Oh, thank you.
You can't really talk about carcerality
without engaging Blackness because it's
so central to the issue and the problem.
But also as a non-Black person, there's
a way that you have to approach the subject without doing
that thing that you talked about when
you were introducing your poems, like starting with the trauma
first.
And I sent one of the graphs, or actually two of the graphs
to Keith Wilson, and he was like, you're doing it.
Like, whether you are aware of it or not,
it's still a disembodied Black body.
And I was like, oh, shit, he's right.
I think we're meant to do that.
The system sets up that estrangement,
and it sets up that distance, and so
engaging the topic of carcerality
is to get up close with Blackness
and really engage it in a way that's not making it
a spectacle.
It's already so central to my work,
but in terms of carcerality, I was just like, none of this
feels right to me.
So as I was doing research and really just super interrogating
and just beating myself up like, how
am I even going to do this, I encountered the Eastern State
Penitentiary.
And in reading about that prisoner, that first prisoner,
and like some of their tactics, [? Kalif ?]
was already so front of mind that I was like this is just
a looping system.
And it just felt like one of the central things
I wanted to address was time.
The construct of time in that we think it's like progress,
and it's measured the same all the time.
But Trump was just impeached yesterday.
Nancy Pelosi wore the same dress.
It's like, we're back at that day.
Oh God, I didn't even--
I didn't-- I've been like so--
check in to make sure that there's not
a fucking actual revolution happening, and then I'd be out.
I feel you, but it was so wild because she
wore the same dress.
The only thing that's different is she's wearing a mask,
and it's like, so this is like another construct of time,
and what time feels like in the prison.
So I wanted to engage all of that stuff.
I still feel like it's not right, but thank you for--
Yeah, no, I think there's this thing that people--
I went to a talk maybe like three years ago, two years ago.
It was [? Denise ?] and Don Lundy Martin and Morgan Parker,
and they were talking about Black bodies.
And this is the thing that [? Denise ?] and Morgan
like all of them were like Black people,
and it's like this thing that I think especially what
you were saying.
We're conditioned to talk about the bodies in prisons.
Not people in prisons, which is the power of [INAUDIBLE],,
and the power of [? Kalif. ?]
It's the story, and that's what you said too
about the people in the detention facility.
That's the first thing that--
it was like really striking.
It's like when we say in terms of the Black Lives Matter
movement, all the problems that come with these
like protest movements.
We have Say Her Name, Say His Name, we have names,
we have lives.
It's so important.
Yeah, I think that spreadsheet, the accumulation
of where these names.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Thank you.
Thank you for that question, and then
for your response, Vanessa, because help me also learn
a little bit more about some of the challenges that I know
came about when individuals were engaging
with this idea and the work behind it.
Raquel, did you have something that you wanted to ask?
I saw you a little bit before the question
was asked by Frank.
Yeah, I was really interested.
Frank, you mentioned a great deal of these
came from a previous manuscript, and I
was curious as to what changed.
What changed in relation to this project?
Obviously, that's a great question.
So I mean, the manuscript that I started
with was actually like the MFA manuscript that
was mentioned in my bio.
So I kind of finished that.
It's so crazy.
You get to feel like, oh, I'm finished,
but that was in like 2019, right?
And so I had what I thought was something
that I was going to go take to shop around and maybe publish,
and I felt like I got advice from people
that I was at that place.
But then a lot of things changed for me,
and I mean just to be like entirely transparent,
I entered therapy for the first time.
I've been now in weekly therapy for a little over a year.
Nah, for real.
Best thing I've ever done for my life.
100%, you know, but it changed a lot about how
I related to my poetry.
It changed a lot about how I related to my entire life.
I wrote this thing about how when
trauma is telling you your story,
revision is your way to the truth.
It's like, I needed to revise my understanding of my life
so that I could have a true understanding of my life,
and that meant also revising a lot of the book.
And so in some ways, it was the literal text of the poems.
Some of the poems are entirely different.
They have the title.
They have the sort of intention or the motivation,
but the content and the shape is entirely different
because I think--
and I mean, no shade.
I mean, all shade on my MFA program, honestly,
but also like just in general, they're
so easily traumatizing to writers of color.
They're so-- they condition us to do this thing where,
write about your suffering or don't
write about your suffering at all because that's played out.
And you know what I mean?
And there's this way where you're not
allowed to be yourself.
You're not allowed to be honest and all these difficult things
that like Vanessa mentioned working through.
You have to work through those things
and shout out and thank God for our friends who can say,
you're getting there, but you're not quite there
yet in terms of-- for me, I'm undoing my masculinity,
unlearning this really deep-rooted systems
of violence, of self betrayal.
You know what I mean?
These kinds of things.
And so taking that and sort of revising the text
to be more honest to myself, not self serving.
You know what I mean?
Those kinds of things for sure.
That actually brings me to a question
I have for both of you.
Something I really picked up on in both of your work
is that you were careful to always come back
to a space of care and a space of humanization,
a space of small moments, like narratives.
Raquel, your poem about the flowers,
it just really takes the brutality
of an institutional space and adds this life layer.
The way that you talk to the characters in your poems.
I really felt their presence.
I even felt God in the way that you addressed her.
It just it felt like your poems are peopled,
and something I struggle with is I just
want to punish myself in my poems.
I just want to bring the rigor and the critique,
and I don't know.
I just feel like poems are always
the space of punishing because it's like the work that
needs to be done.
I don't know.
How are you bringing in care?
How are you bringing in joy and humanness,
and what advice do you have for a very sad poet?
Raquel, do you want to go?
Yeah, it's sort of intense to think
about the present in relation to the past
only because the repetition that you mentioned,
Vanessa, showed up in many ways for me throughout this project.
One of which was that I was reading also
about the tuberculosis outbreak, and the quarantine that was
happening inside the prisons.
And also, because I instinctively was like,
oh my God, we're living in isolation
and writing about the carceral system.
And at the same time, there are people in prison
who I can't even talk to right now, and they're being exposed.
And in this way, it parallels this other temporality,
and in this other way, it doesn't.
And I think it was very weird for me
because I wanted it instinctively
to go to my own personal experience
because that's what I tend to do.
[INAUDIBLE] write what you know.
And so I wanted to write about my father in some ways
and my grandfather and all this stuff, and then I was like,
no, I don't need to do that for this project.
What I can do is approach from my positionality
and without centering it.
And I think that was a struggle for me
because I don't think there's a blueprint for how to do that.
I think we just kind of have to ask those questions over
and over as we're writing.
And my approach was to be like, well,
I don't know about a bunch of this stuff,
so I'm going to learn about all this stuff,
and I'm going to think about what's
not being said in these texts because that's what poets do.
They look at these documents that
are written from this very cold, very [INAUDIBLE] course,
and they see what's not there.
They see what's between the lines,
and so I don't necessarily have to be
100% accurate in everything, but I have
to be accurate to the field.
I have to be accurate to the life that is there,
and so that helped.
And I think it helped me feel less lonely in the process
because weirdly contextualizing myself reminded me
that everybody else was lonely too.
And we were all lonely, and it alleviated
some of that weight of the loneliness,
if that makes sense.
Yeah.
I don't know if that helped.
No, I mean, it was so wild writing
about mass incarceration during a pandemic,
like a fascist uprising or--
yeah.
Yeah.
And [? at the ?] time, very present.
Just I think we don't have the necessary distance
from the present moment to even begin to parse because things
are happening traumatically so quickly that it
feels weird to write about the present.
But somehow, writing about the past, helped me deal with it.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, it's been a lot of--
I mean, obviously, I think the therapy bit.
I don't know.
Like the top of the pandemic, I was like, well, OK, I
got weekly therapy.
I don't get to leave the house.
Ramadan was like a month and a half after that.
So I was like, all right, this is what I'm doing,
and I'm just going to be reflecting.
And I did a lot of yelling, digging through my childhood.
A lot of writing about the past in order
to understand the present.
There is a thing that you said, Vanessa,
though, like this drive to punish yourself
or to want to punish.
And I like fucking relate to that so heavy.
So serious.
One of the big things has been for me
is like I'm working on trying to change
like my internal dialogue because as what I've
been conditioned as a man, I've latched on to these men who
are like coaches.
And these kinds of ways of trying
to tell me to be better by telling me that I wasn't good,
and it's this way that it never brought
me closer to what I wanted.
And in doing so, it also caused me
to want to punish others and be very judgmental or angry
at others for not being whatever I expected of them.
And there is this thing that--
so there's this book called The Gift of Death
by Jacques Derrida.
It's a theory book.
It's Derrida.
Oh, you love-- no one ever said they love Derrida.
That's my shit.
Like, he-- yeah, no, he's saying that the archive will haunt us,
but we can never access it because it's unreadable.
I fucking love Derrida.
Yeah, and the whole thing in The Gift of Death
is that everything--
you know, that the story of Abraham
isn't about him proving his loyalty to God
by being willing to kill his son.
It's God trying to teach him a lesson
about the fact that your death is yours,
and whatever sacrifice--
every choice is a sacrifice of other options.
You can either obey God, or you can keep your son.
You can't do both, and in doing so,
I think that for me it started to make
me think about when I do something, what am I
not able to do because of that.
And so when I come from a place--
when I write poems, most often, my first instinct
is like anger and rage.
It's like these are the people who I'm mad at.
You know what I mean, and y'all should be different.
But then, I'm like also, and I like shout out
to the fucking banging my head against the wall in an MFA
program for three years trying to write to these white people.
And then also like having the illumination
of being in isolation.
Like that line about my cousin is real.
My cousin has been locked up for years, and he can't come out.
They like refuse to see his appeals,
and we can't even-- they have these telenetworks
that you're supposed to be able to reach them and send
messages, and they've been moving people
from prison to prison.
And I haven't even been able to talk to him.
You know what I mean?
His own mother can barely get a hold of him,
and knowing that I can speak to him,
or I can try to speak to these other people,
because I can't effectively communicate to both of them
at once.
And so for me, it's like, in that gift of death,
it's like, OK, so who is really in need,
and who do I feel like I can help, and then bring in terms
of what do I need for me.
I needed to get to a place where tenderness
is something I'm learning, and I'm
trying to learn how to be gentle.
And even with people who aren't gentle with me,
and that means myself.
And I think that trying to build that gentility
and to humanize myself in these poems,
I think that's what helps me do it in these other ways
because what's that pedagogy of the oppressed?
It's like, you have to restore humanity to the oppressed
and to give it back to the oppressor.
And so I'm trying to restore my humanity and in doing so maybe
can give humanity back to others.
Yeah, there's a lot to think about there,
and I wanted to address what you mentioned
about the flowers, Vanessa, because it's interesting.
I do have a tendency throughout my work
to be very much the [INAUDIBLE].
I don't know how you would translate [NON-ENGLISH]
because it's not quite a gesture,
but there's something of--
Like a teasing playfulness.
--with discourse.
So I tend to incorporate a way of talking about people
that's institutional and answer back in a way that sort
of fucks with it or is very [? disidentifitory, ?]
to borrow one of my favorite terms from [? Jose ?] Munoz.
But part of why I opened it with this quote
was because I think a lot about the modernization
project of Puerto Rico as a beautification project as well.
To be able to build this prison that's pretty that has like
a [INAUDIBLE] patio, and it's like so--
you can show it to the world.
It's such a pretty structure, and obviously,
contrasts so much with the ruins that it is now.
Like, I pass by [NON-ENGLISH] every day.
And how the movement of the flowers throughout the piece
have a lot to do with the difference between what
something's purposed for and what people make of it.
So the flowers were meant to be a beautification of something
ugly, and that ended up being a space where prisoners grew food
that helped them survive during the war years
because they didn't have enough food coming in.
And at the same time, they still kept the flowers up,
and they had to keep that up.
They were the ones that planted them.
They were the ones that nurtured them.
And especially now, one of the first things
I bring to my students in classes,
I ask them to go interview someone in their family that
is an elder that works with plants because a lot of elders
here have worked with plants.
And one of the things that's most beautiful to me
is that happens across gender lines.
You have old men tending for their plants,
and you have old women tending to their plants,
and no one feels that emasculates them.
So for me, it makes sense as a place
to go immediately to think of the ways in which connection
with the Earth, especially in something
like a prison where people are forced to disconnect
from all things that are the Earth or nature or whatever.
In this context, to be able to grow plants was very important.
And originally, as part of this project,
I was going to work with [? Elizabeth, ?]
a very, very wonderful artists here.
I can also send a link to her work,
but she's been working with a women's prison in Bayamón
for a long time, taking Earth and plants to the prison
and working with the women to grow things.
And it's actually very intense because there
are certain sorts of soil and Earth
that they have to check before they can go into the prison,
and so a lot of this for me was like both the stark violence
of the institution and also it's just
something that just couldn't be repressed or contained
or killed off, that is alive and is there and is right
and is happening with imprisoned peoples.
I was so compelled by-- what was the term?
It was like penal decolonization.
Do a small scale decolonization action
within the space of the prison, which is like the most
colonial structure.
That was just a really beautiful moment.
Yeah, and at the same time, I critique--
and this is probably the last thing
I'll say because I feel like I'm taking up too much space,
but there's this thing that happens
in Puerto Rico on the left where there's
a lot of advocacy for the freeing of political prisoners
who fought for the independence of Puerto Rico.
And a lot of distinguishing them as political prisoners as
opposed to the other prisoners, which are not political.
And so I really wanted to push against that notion,
and there's also a play on the sort of argument
that the state is the criminal or that the government is
a criminal.
That happens a lot in the left, where even when
there were mass arrests of corrupt politicians,
on the part of the federal authorities,
there was a celebration of that in a way.
And it was very hard for me because, on the one hand,
yes, absolutely, these are horrible people that
should be brought to justice but not just
through the carceral system, or maybe
like the Justice Mussolini guy.
So my vision of Justice, I don't feel corresponds at all
to the carceral system, and yet so much
of our conversations in the left here are still
very structured by that notion.
It is through this system that we're
going to reach some kind of Justice,
and I couldn't really connect with that,
and I wanted to push against it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Raquel, for that thoughtful response.
I think we're going to end there.
I feel that we could talk so much more about this topic,
but I think that the key is that you brought your whole self
to this project.
And in doing that, you are going to inspire so many more
conversations, necessary conversations,
at this really challenging time.
Challenging, as a euphemism for something else.
Challenging time in the world, and I just
want to thank you all.
You've been amazing.
You've inspired me with your work, your dedication,
and I can't wait to get this online so that other people can
enjoy it aside from us, but I'm very grateful.
Thank you.