[Reader-list] Teens in jail write poetry that heals

[Chintan]

From
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/learn-as-you-go/healing-power-of-prison-poetry

 Healing Power of Prison Poetry
Writers help teens in jail learn to express difficult truths by putting
pencil to paper.


On a brisk September morning I wait in a dormitory (read: cell block) at
King County Juvenile Detention in Seattle as a volunteer ushers in a group
of five boys (read: inmates). The young men—three black, a Latino, and a
white—have all weathered storms that I can scarcely fathom: born with drugs
in their infant bodies, or abandoned by both parents, or traumatized by
watching friends gunned down before their eyes.

As they come into the room, they strike a balance between obedience and
resistance: hands behind their backs, smirks on their faces. Seeing their
peach-fuzzed cheeks, absurd haircuts, and guarded gazes returns me
forcefully to my own high school days, which took place less than a mile
east of here. I know that many of these prisoners were up to mischief no
worse than I got into myself: graffiti, smoking pot, chronic truancy. One of
my mother’s favorite phrases, there but for the grace of God go I, keeps
cycling through my head, but I correct it: There but for the color of my
skin, the support of my family, the promise of higher education, there but
for all of my invisible privilege, go I.

I had an advantage beyond these things, though—the written word. I started
scrawling the first terrible lines of my own poetry at age 13 and found
relief from the life events that haunted me, whether simple drama (breakups)
or real tragedy (the mental illness of my best friend). So I’m honored to be
here among other volunteers as a member of the Pongo Publishing Teen Writing
Project <http://www.pongopublishing.org/>, which assists distressed youths
in trading self-destructive and anti-social behaviors for poetic
self-expression.

I’ve been here three times before: once for a stern orientation and twice
for a sort of acclimation, during which the other volunteers and I huddled
in unused dormitories to write our own poetry, an activity intended to help
us identify with the kids and sensitize us to the struggle for creativity in
a penal landscape. Parades of jump-suited kids filed past, casting aloof
glances at us as if we were very lost tourists.

Today, a kid with a well-kept Afro spots me, grins, and saunters to my
table. I am supposed to invite him to open his heart on my very blank pad of
paper. I breathe deeply, shake his hand, and present my spiel.

“So, as Adrienne probably told you, we come in here because we believe that
young people who have been through hard stuff have important things to say.
We think the most important element of good writing is that it comes from
the heart.”

Maxwell raises plucked eyebrows and nods at the first page in a stack of
prompts. I slide the exercise, “I Am,” and a dulled pencil in front of him.
Ten minutes later, he pushes it back, and his eyes are different, brighter.
This is Maxwell’s first time writing with Pongo, but it won’t be his last;
he employs his rapper’s talent to speak from his heart.



*I Am Who I Am*

*Today I’m focused like a lens on a camera*

*Yesterday I was hard-headed like a hard-head on a hammer*

*On the street I’m so serious they call me Lil SB (Strictly Bizness)*

*In my room I’m like a failing quiz, you shouldn’t test me*

*To my mom I’m a little square like a rectangle*

*To my dad I’m a ghost, I can disappear like Chris Angel*

*My friends think I’m mean like the wicked witch of the west*

*Really I’m cool with something big pumping in my chest*



The Pongo Publishing Teen Writing Project was founded in 1992 by a writer
named Richard Gold. Gold had spent years teaching poetry at a San Francisco
school for special-needs kids, where most of the youths were also patients
at a psychiatric clinic. He observed that writing poetry could disarm
traumatized and troubled kids’ natural hesitancy and help them learn the
ability and value of self-expression.

Pongo’s writing sessions give youth a chance to express often-difficult
truths. The program’s small press turns those expressions into anthologies,
presenting the teens’ voices to the world in a format that conveys respect
and dignity. Since 2000, Pongo has worked with more than 4,000 teens in
youth prisons, homeless centers, and the two mainstays of the Pongo program:
a children’s psychiatric hospital in Lakewood, Washington, and the
9-year-old program at King County Detention. Pongo has published 12 volumes
of teen poetry, 12,000 copies of which have been distributed to distressed
youths, libraries, judges, schools, and social service agencies.

Between 2005 and 2008, Pongo surveyed nearly 300 of the kids who
participated in the project. One-third of Pongo youths had never or hardly
written before; 100 percent enjoyed writing; 66 percent wrote about issues
they normally wouldn’t talk about; 80 percent felt better from their
writing; and 96 percent claimed they would write more in the future.

Pongo takes kids who have been left out of the educational system at every
step and draws them into learning and expression. In the year that I’ve
worked with Pongo, I’ve watched these kids open up through writing.

Every Tuesday between September and April, the other volunteers and I were
allowed to enter a raucous classroom in Detention’s public school program to
make our upbeat pitch, “Who wants to come write poetry?!” Plastic chairs
bucked into odd configurations as the kids leaned back. Some heckled. Many
crossed their arms: There were the skinny appendages of a precocious addict
or the thick, tattooed ones of a Deuce-8 gang leader. Some days their cool
aversion was contagious. Other days more students raised their hands than we
could handle.

Regardless of their initial level of enthusiasm, once each kid sat down at a
table across from a Pongo volunteer, heard that the only determinant of
“good” poetry for us was honesty, and started writing, he was captivated.

In the vast majority of cases Pongo volunteers are the first to invite a kid
to speak about his struggles with the motive of honoring them instead of
analyzing them, and on some level each kid realizes that. Pivotal life
events that may never come up in counseling sessions sometimes emerge in
Pongo poetry. Freed from the judgment of their peers and the interrogations
of psychologists, however benevolent, students get immersed in the natural
high that comes when you abandon the bravado, bluffing, and bullshit and
start finding truth and color from within.

Pongo is only a small part of these kids’ weekly education. In Detention,
the public schools literally have a captive audience. But the disparity
between what happens in class and the lives of the kids could hardly be
wider. Algebra and grammar rules are often the last things on their minds.

John, for example, with wild eyes and a honeyed voice, has never learned to
write decently because he’s been booted out of every high school he’s
attended. Jeremy squeezes his pencil so hard his knuckles whiten as he
recounts the lesson he’s taken from his best friend’s murder: “That I’d
better worry ’bout the bullet coming for me—fuck homework.” The
bulldog-shaped, quick-to-tears Terry is too busy trying to “breathe right”
and manage his anger to pay attention in class.

Why should these kids place education above the gang allegiance that keeps
them alive on the street or provides them the family they’ve never had? Why
should teens that suffer from PTSD due to repeated rapes or a friend’s
killing embrace the challenge of a textbook instead of the relief of a pipe?

This is the terrain on which Pongo operates—the writing is not just another
classroom exercise. The poetry allows these young people to practice
self-expression and talk about their experiences in a safe place. Pongo
invites them to exchange shame for candor, to witness their truths on the
page, to look at their circumstances analytically, and to honor the strength
that’s enabled them to survive hardship. And perhaps most importantly,
Pongo’s youths learn to use writing to deal with their memories, rage,
sorrow, and trauma, instead of turning to gangs, prostitution, and drug
abuse.

It’s tragic that these kids had to land in a detention center to receive an
education in honest self-expression. But the kids who walk out of Pongo gain
a new faith, however nascent, in the power of their own voice, and may be
less likely to return to a place like this.

At the end of every Pongo afternoon, we deliver four freshly typed copies of
each poem back to its author. This always happens at shift-change hour, when
all the kids are locked down in their cells. So as we walk the worn linoleum
corridors, past the circular control posts manned by deadpan guards, our
footfalls echo. We can’t even hear the voices of the kids until we enter the
dormitory, and then they are muted behind tons of steel and cinderblock. But
when we slide their poems beneath the door of their cells and bump fists
through the Plexiglass window, their smiles are plain to see.
------------------------------



[image: Eli-Hastings.jpg]Eli Hastings wrote this article for *Learn as You
Go*<http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/learn-as-you-go/theme-guide-learn-as-you-go>,
the Fall 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Eli teaches creative writing in
nontraditional contexts.  He is author of the memoir Falling Room (Bison
Books, 2006). His writing has appeared in more than a dozen literary
journals.