Last summer, I asked my cousin Trevor Reese, incarcerated in Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola prison), what I could send him for his birthday. He requested Richard Wright’s book of haiku (published posthumously by his family as Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon). Soon, Trevor started sending me his own arresting poems, intertwining the vocabulary of prison—chickenwire, chainlink, fences, security lights—with the imagery of promise—diamonds of light, birds flying south, slowly escaping. I felt the poems enacted a reaching toward something just out of reach: blue shampoo bottle / “Classic Clean” /I would like to be.
Lawson Strickland and John Corley, also incarcerated at Angola, enact a similar posture in their poems: reaching across the divide, reads the last sentence of Strickland’s poem “Five/Fourths.” Toward what? A person, the past, or a future faraway or impossible.
Each poet here is also attuned to form in a way that liberates. When bars as these won’t read, a villanelle, writes Strickland, naming the form he is occupying. Meanwhile, John Corley employs ekphrasis, offering an extended reading of a discovered wall that transports us to ancient Pompeii: How many left that August morning / for work in the fields, the vineyards / the shops, civil or military duty / not knowing . . . they would never see home again? Here we travel far from prison, but the line echoes something Trevor said to me once, an idea he crystalizes here: I didn’t know / the last time I swam / was the last time.
At the beginning of National Poetry Month, it feels right to read these poems and remember that, despite the horrors of U.S. prisons, incarcerated writers are doing the lifesaving work of making beauty. Which reminds me of another haiku, this one by Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), one of Trevor’s favorite masters: In this world / we walk on the roof of hell / gathering blossoms.
—Katharine Blake, collection guest editor
Image: Tasha Kostyuk / Unsplash