every story worth telling has a thousand beginnings
For lawyer, writer, and former prisoner Reginald Dwayne Betts, poetry is closely linked to re-invention and survival. I recently listened to him talk about his latest collection of poetry on the themes of imprisonment, freedom, and social injustice on CBC radio.
The collection was inspired by the time he spent in prison as a young man. It speaks to how powerful the condensed language of poetry is, and how it lends itself to be remembered and carried away by others.
If you’re a poet, you can give somebody everything in two minutes — and they can walk away with it ringing in their head.
Betts started writing after receiving Dudley Randall’s anthology The Black Poets through the underground prison library while in solitary confinement. For Betts, that collection was a history lesson, and he learned that his own experience was part of a much larger system of injustice and resistance that stretched back generations.
In an article in The American Poetry Review Betts writes about the impact of prison poetry on his development as a writer and how anger and pain “can be a bridge to the poetic moment.” Personal and cultural silences are his source material, and offer new ways of thinking about the past and imagining a better future.
Inspiration can be found in unlikely places. Some of his poems are constructed out of redacted court documents involving people imprisoned because they could not pay their fines. His poems expose the often hidden stories of poverty and injustice, and in creating them he has offered us a narrative of survival and resilience.
In his poems about fatherhood, he explores the bind of racial stereotypes as well as the complex dynamics of stigma. His decision not to write about aspects of his own experience reflects his desire to protect his sons from the legacy of his own mistakes. Reflecting on things that remain unsaid, he states that the stories his sons will not know are like Pandora’s boxes best left unopened.
His work is concerned with the complex question of how to carry our past in ways that don’t limit or define us. While this points towards the possibility of re-construction, Betts reminds us of how the reaction of others can put limits to these possibilities.
No matter what your successes are, many people want to imagine that this is the only thing you are.
In an essay in The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson argues that Bett’s poetry can be read as instructions for re-invention as it “suggests how the past might be reframed and made intelligible.” Part of that process for Betts was the act of re-naming himself in prison. In taking on the name Shahid (which means witness in Arabic), Betts expresses his task as a writer asking “What am I here for except to be a witness?”