Chants of Indictment David M. Katz (bio) Felon Reginald Dwayne Betts W. W. Norton & Company https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393652147 112pages; Cloth, $26.95 The fourth line of “Ghazal,” the opening poem in Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts’s powerful yet nuanced new volume, contains an ars poetica in miniature for the book: “redaction is a dialect after prison.” In the four “redaction poems,” which represent a major advance for both the poet himself and for the use of public documents in contemporary American poetry overall, Betts crosses out lengthy chunks of legal filings with thick black lines — lines, it has been said, that appropriately resemble prison bars. Along with the visual impact of the redactions, the remaining words and phrases deliver a rhythmically charged case against the criminal justice system for the onerous bail it often demands from poor people. Unlike the redactions in the Mueller report, for example, Betts’s redactions don’t use his omissions to hide telling facts. Instead, they seek to reveal “the tragedy, drama, and injustice of a system that makes people simply a reflection of their bank accounts,” he writes in an explanatory note. Carving these poems out of legal documents filed by the Civil Rights Corps, a criminal-justice advocacy group, Betts follows in the tradition of Testimony (1965) and Holocaust (1975), Charles Reznikoff’s sweeping poetic investigations of the dark side of twentieth-century history. Although the work of both poets reveals injustice, their approaches to the use of documents differ sharply. Working from nineteenth-century legal cases and records of the Nuremburg trials, Reznikoff strips out the turgid rhetoric to yield a spare, Objectivist poetry that lays bare social ills without commenting on them. For his part, Betts excerpts and reshapes the legal phrases, turning them into chants of indictment against what he observes to be injustices of the prison system. While these poems don’t refer to Betts’s own experience, their impetus is clearly personal. In 1996, at the age of sixteen, Betts, a high school honors student, took the fatal step that continues to resound through all his writings. In a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, he tapped the window of a car with a pistol, awakening the sleeping driver and, along with a fifteen-year-old friend, stole the vehicle. Tried as an adult — as was often the case in those years, when black juveniles tended to be regarded as “super predators” by prosecutors — he ended up serving eight years and four months in various prisons, including two six-month-long stretches in solitary. While in prison, Betts intensively read and wrote poetry and began studying law from books available to him. Incredibly, he was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 2017, two decades after serving his last day in prison. Much of his experience behind bars through the age of twenty-four is recounted in his trenchant 2009 memoir, A Question of Freedom, while Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015), a previous volume of verse, riffs on the historical roots of the increase in crimes like his and of the rise in mass imprisonment. How that experience and history will play out after prison is the territory Felon explores. In the masterly “Ghazal,” Betts supplies a map for navigating what will follow. “Name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison,” he writes, adding “you’re still a suspect after prison.” The “song” named is the ode-like form of the ghazal itself. Typically expressive of longing, ghazals proceed in self-contained couplets that can sometimes be considered poems in themselves. Like prisoners in adjoining cells, Betts’s couplets call out to each other in a “dialect” they share that’s suggested by the word “prison,” the word he has chosen to end every other line. Fittingly, the form replicates the speaker’s endlessly returning obsession with all that the word means to him. By the final, richly allusive couplet, however, he discovers and invokes the means of his liberation: “You have come so far, Beloved, & for what, another song? / Then sing. Shahid you’re loved, not shipwrecked, after prison.” Like the Arabic and Persian poets who originated the form, Betts addresses...
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Oct 18, 2024
Kiran Konakalla 
