Prison Poetry Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction Wendy Pfeffer In 2011, I had the good fortune to spend an extended period of time in Occitania, working on my own research and meeting a good number of scholars. This sojourn was very productive; it also served to make me aware of how much research was being conducted in Europe on Occitan literature written after the medieval period. Given my bibliographic experience, I should not have been surprised. I had found 485 entries by primary authors or literary critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, published between 1977-2007 in my bibliography of Occitan literary scholarship for that period. Nonetheless, I was struck by how much activity was being devoted to these centuries in European Occitan studies. In North America, I had seen nothing comparable. I took advantage of my position as editor to invite a select group of individuals to contribute to this special issue of Tenso, devoted to the literature of the Occitan Renaissance and specifically to poet Bellaud de la Bellaudière. Each individual was chosen for a specific reason and each contributes his/her own ideas to this common discussion of a period not well-known even to many Tenso readers. Louis Bellaud de la Bellaudière was born in Grasse, during the second quarter of the sixteenth century.1 He had a joyous youth in Provence before embarking on adventure; between 1561 and 1572, we have no trace of him. He reappears, however, in 1572, when he was in Bordeaux, hoping to join the French fleet heading to fight the Spanish. That naval expedition was abandoned, and Louis attempted to return to Provence. 1572 was the year of the St Bartholemew massacre and the direct route home (the Garonne valley) was blocked by the Protestants, so the poet took a northern detour and was arrested en route. By the end of the year, he was in prison in Moulins, where he would stay for about eighteen months. We do not know the reasons for his arrest, but we do know that only the king could free him, so Bellaud encouraged his friends and relations to appeal on his behalf to Paris. [End Page 1] During this prison stay, Bellaud composed a good deal of poetry, much of it published after his death. Once released from prison in 1574, he returned to Aix-en-Provence where he found an protector in Henry of Angoulême, who was killed in 1586. Without a patron, Bellaud retired and died shortly later. After the poet’s death in 1588, Pierre Paul, himself an Occitan author, published the complete works of Bellaud de la Bellaudière in several volumes, notably the Sonnets et autres rimes de la prison (1595), le Dondon infernal (first extant edition 1588)2 and Lous Passatens (1595). Some call Bellaud de la Bellaudière the heir of the troubadours and the precursor of the Félibres; such a description limits the poet to the world of Occitan. His prison poetry compares favorably to that of Villon, as well as to that of more recent authors. His vision of Provence and his use of language put him firmly in the Renaissance world of copia, of linguistic exploration and discovery. I find it remarkable that his prison poetry was composed in Occitan, when the prison and certainly his jailors were in a French-speaking region—we may have an early example of linguistic defiance. In celebration of this Renaissance lyricist, Tenso is pleased to participate in the rebirth of interest in Bellaud. The first essay is by Jean-François Courouau, whose books and articles on Renaisssance Occitan literature are obligatory reading for those who seek to understand the period and its authors. In 2011, Courouau was lecturing at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail on Renaissance authors; I knew vaguely that he was working on another book (which has just appeared) and that his interest in Renaissance authors was perhaps unquenchable. It was imperative that he contribute an essay to this collection, an analysis of the self in Bellaud’s sonnets and how the poet presents and hides himself behind the subject pronoun. Another Toulouse meeting was with Sylvan Chabaud. Yes, Sylvan, with no -i...

Punishment Without Crime: Belarusian Prison Poetry

Punishment Without Crime: Belarusian Prison Poetry

Punishment Without Crime: Belarusian Prison Poetry

Punishment Without Crime: Belarusian Prison Poetry

Kisangani: A Chronicle of Return

Faustin Linyekula and Studios Kabako toured more more more ... future across the United States this past year. What a production it was, too, at once poignant to the point of pathos—especially in the prison poetry of Antoine Vumilia Muhindo hauntingly intoned in the baritone of the gold-spangled vocalist Patient Mufutala Useni—but all the while throbbing with the virtuosic rhythms for which the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been so famous so long. It is hard to characterize Faustin Linyekula’s performance idiom, and although a bit of a stretch, it seems almost a Congolese butoh in its war-weary disgust for corruption, its despair, angst, and rawest of earthy emotions; yet any such drama is embodied through the exuberant beat of ndombolo, the latest of Kinshasa’s infectious dance genres. For more more more ... future, ndombolo’s “charged, sultry brew of funk, rumba, and traditional Congolese rhythms” (La Rocco 2011) was set forth by the brilliant composer, bandleader, and electric guitarist Flamme Kapaya, with Remi Bassinta Nightness on bass and Patou Tempete Kayembe on drums. Captivated by these musicians, “the body wants to burrow into” their riffs, “but the mind is stopped, or at least given pause, by the vociferous political message it carries” (ibid.).

Prison Poetry: Sighet, Romania

photoL funkystock. inset photo: The Civic Academy Foundation Prison Poetry Sighet, Romania 160 World Literature Today outpost S ighet Prison, located in Sighet Marmației, Romania, was opened in 2000 as a museum archiving the long history of the building as a prison, factory, and warehouse. Inside the museum are cells containing information that chronicles the history of the building and Romania under Soviet occupation. The Sighet prison, which opened in 1897 under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was mainly used for common criminals after 1918. In 1944 the Soviet Union invaded Romania, and by 1948 the prison was used for political dissidents, mainly students and peasants from Maramures. In the 1950s, dignitaries from all over the country were transported to Sighet, most of them over sixty years old and working as ministers, academics, military officers , journalists, politicians, historians, bishops, Greek and Roman Catholic priests, and economists. The prison was known as the “Danube colony” and considered to be a “special work unit.” However, the prison was used as an extermination site for the elites in the country. Until 1955, two hundred prisoners were housed in Sighet, with fiftytwo deaths occurring under the Soviet regime. After 1955 the prison was once again used for common criminals. In 1977 the buildings were converted into a broom factory and salt warehouse before being abandoned. Among the many cells in Sighet Prison is the poetry cell located on the first floor. The cell walls are covered from floor to ceiling in poems written by prisoners. Prisoners weren’t given paperorpencil.Instead,thepoemswere transmitted and inscribed on the walls in Morse code. Some prisoners archived the poems by sewing them into medical bandages. Several of the authors have remained anonymous, while a few of the poems have been connected to somefamousauthorsbutremainnameless in the museum to preserve the anonymity with which the poems were composed. – Melissa Weiss Melissa Weiss is a WLT intern. A sculpture group entitled Parade of the Sacrificed by Aurel Vlad on the grounds of the Sighet prison. inset Inside the first floor poetry cell. ...

Prison Poetry: Sighet, Romania

Prison Poetry: Sighet, Romania

Die leser in Breyten Breytenbach se tronkpoësie

Breyten Breytenbach is the most important prison writer in the Afrikaans literary tradition. This article briefly places his prison writing against the background of national and international prison writing before going on to investigate the way in which the reader is represented in his Afrikaans prison poetry. Research about prison writing points out the importance of communication with the outside world for the prisoner. To the prisoner who is also a creative writer, writing is one of the most important means of establishing contact with the outside world. Amongst the large number of poems in Breytenbach’s body of prison poetry which depict an attempt to communicate with the outside world, there are several in which the addressee is explicitly referred to as the reader. The focus of this investigation thus falls on that which reception aesthetics refer to as a”text-internal reader” or “explicit reader”, directly or indirectly addressed in the text. The investigation shows that the poet-narrator in Breytenbach’s prison poems is very conscious of the reader’s role in the concretization of the poem. Several poems from Breytenbach’s body of prison poetry, collected in the anthology Die ongedanste dans (“The undanced dance”, 2005), are analysed to show different facets of the poetnarrator’s relationship with the reader. Some of these analyses describe the poet-narrator’s circumspect approach to the reader and the explanations and instructions given to the reader. Other analyses focus on the poet-narrator’s attempts to manipulate references to time in order to create the illusion of simultaneity with the reader. Further analyses show that the prison writer’s emphasis on the anonymity and absence of the reader can be related to philosophical representations of signification while at the same time being grounded in the material circumstances of Breytenbach’s imprisonment. It is also shown that some of the poems depict the reader as being complicit in creating the circumstances in which the prison poet finds himself.

“Labyrinth of loneliness”: Breyten Breytenbach’s prison poetry (1976–1985)

Breytenbach’s prison poetry is first contextualized as part of a South African subgenre that flourished under apartheid, and then interrogated for its specificities: the singular prison conditions under which he wrote, the nature of the poetry, specific leitmotifs in each of the five volumes published between 1976 and 1985. A psychoanalytic approach is indicated to this strong middle phase in his extensive poetical oeuvre, comprising seventeen collections of poetry.

Prison, Poetry, and Polyphony in Abdilatif Abdalla'sSauti ya Dhiki

This article is a study of the prison poetry of Abdilatif Abdalla, one of the most talented twentieth-century Swahili poets. Abdalla penned his collection of poems Sauti ya Dhiki while serving a prison term for sedition during the Jomo Kenyatta regime in postindependence Kenya. Prison as a site for writing had tremendous influence on the form and content of his poetical productions. In this regard I suggest that, for the most part, the terribly unpleasant prison conditions that the poet experienced, enabled, and enhanced the occurrence in his poetry of a psychic or philosophical journey, which may or may not have been therapeutic, and the articulation of a whole range of voices. I undertake a close reading of Sauti ya Dhiki , exploring the symbolic journey and the polyphony that characterizes Abdalla's reaction to his incarceration by what Achille Mbembe would call the postcolonial potentate.

'The Second Shore': The Poetry of Male and Female Political Prisoners in Postwar Poland

This essay explores a body of 340 poems created by political prisoners who were accused of and imprisoned for anti-state activity in late 1940s and 1950s Stalinist Poland. Evaluating prison poetry as a historical source, I understand the process of composing a poem as the result of a prisoner’s need to document the world around her/himself, as a psychological activity that contained diffi cult prison experiences, as a negotiation of emotional and often conflicting states, and as a social practice through which prison poets affected themselves and the people around them. Situated somewhere at the intersection of the personal and political, poetry became one of the most powerful sites of resistance. In addition to evaluating prison poetry as a historical source, this essay also explores gender differences and similarities in the body of 340 poems discussed here and in the social function of the prison poems.

The Political Prisoner as Antihero: The Prison Poetry of Wole Soyinka and 'Ahmad Fu'ad Nigm

The Political Prisoner as Antihero: The Prison Poetry of Wole Soyinka and 'Ahmad Fu'ad Nigm

Close confinement: John Thelwall and the Romantic prison

The prison was the central institutional means for silencing dissent in 1790s Britain. While attention to prisons was called for by John Howard in the 1770s, prison conditions commanded broad attention by the 1790s, when dozens of writers, editors, journalists, and booksellers lived through or were threatened with imprisonment. The 1790s saw the first systematic imprisonment of British literati, resulting in a flurry of poems, essays, broadsheets, drawings, and newspaper reports that introduced a wide range of readers to life inside a jail cell. The birth of “prison literature” is twin to the birth of British Romanticism: the prison plays an important role in the work of Thelwall, Coleridge, More, Wordsworth, Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, and of lesser‐known figures such as James Montgomery, John Augustus Bonney, and Charles Piggot. This essay examines the writing of prison poets such as Thelwall, Montgomery, and Bonney, arguing that the experience of confinement drew these writers to shape their poetry in ways that would anticipate and influence the conventions of Romantic verse. In inaugurating the formal complex that M.H. Abrams called the “greater Romantic lyric,” 1790s prison poetry is an unrecognized but important space for our understanding of the history of poetic form.

An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca

From Chicano down-and-out street tough and maximum-security-prison denizen to slam champion, holder of the Wallace Stevens Chair at Yale, and recent winner of Germany's most prestigious International Award, Jimmy Santiago Baca has led a most unusual life. Filled to the brim with great pleasures and sufferings, harmonies and contradictions, his breathtaking poetry, fervent memoir, sharp-sighted short stories, social dramas, and other creative work ate a testimony to this and form an important corner stone to Chicano/a and American letters today. Born in 1952 in New Mexico to a Chicana mother and an Apache Indian father, he learned swiftly and suddenly the pains of not belonging. After Baca's father died of alcoholism and his mother packed her bags for California, the young Baca found himself first living with his grandparents and then deposited in an orphanage. After years of growing up within the walls of the orphanage and dropping out of high school, Baca hit the streets of Albuquerque to find solace with other like-minded, deeply alienated Chicanos. Barely getting by and treading deep the streets of cities scattered throughout the Southwest, in 1973 and at age 21 he found himself charged with possession and intent to distribute drugs, and was sentenced to a six-years lock up in a maximum security prison in Florence, Arizona. Four years of isolation plus electric shock treatment did not break Baca's spirit. Indeed, Baca turned his internment into a self-fashioned chrysalis: starting from scratch, he first learned how to read and write, subsequently he applied himself to master words and aesthetic forms, and ultimately he devoted himself to become a creator with both. All along this unusual apprenticeship he never lost sight of his one and only goal: to use the power of literature to build new worlds, new meanings, new emotions, and new interpretations in order to help his readers reach a position from which the actual world could be perceived under a different light and could be related to in fresh, much more complex, finally compassionate, and racist-free ways. With a GED tucked safely under his arm and a library patiently stored in his brain from his secluded years of assimilation of the wonders and craft of Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, William Wordsworth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg, to name only a few, Baca walked out of prison ready to face the world as a self-identified Chicano poet. That is to say, both as a Chicano and as a poet--an inseparable whole for his aim was from the start to give literary expression to his uniquely located and time-bound experiences, not to craft poetry for poetry's sake. Through literature, he hoped, those experiences could make the leap from the private sphere of the atomized individual to the public domain of the communicable, the diversely evaluated, the possibly shared or challenged, and ultimately the socially effective. Words, for Baca, were the seeds he would plant to grow roots in a land that had constantly discriminated against, excluded, displaced, and discarded not only him but also his Chicano/a compatriots, the Mexican and other Latino immigrants, the African Americans, the Asian Americans, as well as numerous other groups of fellow citizens. Baca's pinta (prison) resonated loud with audiences inside and outside of the State penitentiary. While still in prison, his first poems saw the light of day in Mother Jones, and a year before his release he published his first chapbook, Jimmy Santiago Baca (1978). In these early poems, his already exceptional lyrical voice speaks out against the dehumanizing conditions of prison life. The year of Baca's release from the penitentiary in 1979 also marked the publication of his first collection of poetry, Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems. The deprecatory stance has here a wide range dealing with racism, oppression, and exploitation in our social system, and the finely honed lyricism speaks as well to the Chicano/a condition more generally. …

'At my grates no Althea': Prison Poetry and the Consolations of Sack in the Interregnum

In the trans-shifting times of the mid-seventeenth century, imprisonment became as much a cavalier mode as the good life or love and affection. The prison poetry written in this period (not exclusively by those who had experienced confinement) moves away from the penitential meditations previously dominating this sub-genre into a celebration of common misfortune alleviated by drink. Classical drinking songs become politicised 'catches', individual authorship is subsumed, and Cavalier prison poets abandon complex rhetoric for simpler poems in ballad form which can be easily transmitted as propaganda and read as a defiant reaction to defeat.

Prison Poetry: A Medium for Growth and Change

Poetry is an excellent therapeutic medium for use in prisons. It can be written in confined spaces, can be shared with fellow prisoners, and encourages self-expression for those whose routines and confinement may tend to stifle the exploration of person and experience that is a vital part of growth and self-awareness. The article presents both a program for poetry and creative writing in the prison setting and an inmate’s poetry to illustrate the kinds of growth and change that can be engendered through poetic expression.

The archetypal mandala: Visions of the self in the poetry of Coleridge, Eliot and Breytenbach

This paper is a preliminary survey of the visions of the s e lf in poetry. It is concerned with the transformation of consciousness as depicted by each of the three poets a Romantic, a Modernist and a Postmodernist poet respectively and expressed in specific poems with a cyclical nature. The romantic poet Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is taken as the first example. It is found to be an allegory of the metamorphosis of the poet’s temporal subjective consciousness into an ‘eternal ’ subject position in the narrated text. Eliot’s "Four Quartets" exemplifies the Modernist mode of consciousness as an 'anironic vision of unity' achieved by adhering to a religio-aesthetic meta-narrative. Breytenbach (1988:115) calls his volumes of prison poetry "The Undanced Dance". Taken as a whole "The Undanced Dance" has a structure which concurs with what Brodey (1971:4) calls "an Einsteinian time-space form of relations” and lures its readers into the trap of falling into postmodern quantum consciousness.

Breyten Breytenbach en die Simbolisme - ’n voorlopige verkenning

This article is an attempt to outline the difference between Breytenbach's poetic method and that of the Symbolists. Although it touches on aspects of the symbolist poetic method like the rich suggestiveness, the creation o f a meaningful alternative world (and the effort of doing this), it focuses mainly on Breytenbach’s use of metaphor to create an impossible alternative world in a poem, only to relativize and destroy it again in the end. This process is illustrated in an analysis of poem 8.1 from Lotus. This analysis also shows up five well-known cardinal traits of Breytenbach’s poetry, viz. its carnality, the universal analogy between body, cosmos and poetry and the great emphasis on journeys, discoveries and transformations by means of language. It is also claimed that the Zen-Buddhisi Void plays an analogous role in Breytenbach's poetry to the theory of correspondances in the Symbolists: it is a rich source of metaphor. Breytenbach's poetry shows a strong duality between the present world and a meaningful alternative sphere. Being in and of this alternative sphere only aggravates the poet’s isolation (a typically symbolist trait), making him literally and figuratively an exile, as exile poems like "tot siens, kaapstad" (see you again, cape town) and "Walvis in die berg" (Whale on the mountain) and, of course, his prison poetry, clearly show.

"The Violent Space": The Function of the New Black Aesthetic in Etheridge Knight's Prison Poetry

"The Violent Space": The Function of the New Black Aesthetic in Etheridge Knight's Prison Poetry