Doing Time Read Online Free Page B

away, and PEN’s executives took little interest. By the late 1980s, most committee work had fallen to overburdened receptionists, and the PWP nearly expired. It is to the credit of a few dedicated members that, even so, there was a never a year without a PEN prison writing contest. In 1990 PEN president Larry McMurtry appointed Fielding Dawson, who in 1987 had edited a special issue on prison writing for Witness and had taught in prison, to head a reinvigorated PWP committee, strengthened further by his successors Bibi Wein and Hettie Jones. PWP director Jackson Taylor has restored a rich mentor program, and at a stirring twenty-fifth-anniversary ceremony in 1998, Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, offered the keynote address.
    In twenty-five years, PEN has accumulated a rare archive of testimony, a mine of information about linguistic and literary culture as well as social culture behind bars. Prisoners have their own evolving lexicon, well known in their home neighborhoods. Inventive language travels from the street to the “joint” and back, ripening with each journey. Much penitentiary argot is decades old: “joint, 95 “slammer” for prison; “hack,” “screw,” “canine,” “roller,” “C.O.” for a guard or corrections officer; “fish” for a new prisoner, “rap partner” for crime partner, “road dog” for friend, “cellie” for cellmate. “Homeboy,” “homey,” or “homes,” shedding its origin in hometown, is simply buddy. Solitary confinement (Administrative Segregation, Special Housing Unit, Control Unit, in bureaucratic lingo) is for convicts simply the “hole” or the “box.” An arrest and conviction is a “fall”; “down” is serving time; a sentence is a “bit” or “bid”; near the end of it, one is “short.” The crafted repartee in Doing Time owes much to the “dozens” — stylized verbal battles perfected by young African-American men.
    Poetry coming out of the seventies was often stamped with Black Arts movement stylistics (including spelling: “Amerikkka”) and marked by revolutionary fervor. It was a heady period for African-American prisoners. (Students in my Westchester County Penitentiary class admired George Jackson’s stoical self-discipline in Soledad Broth en After Jackson’s death, Charles Caldwell wrote, in “A Poem with George Jackson”: “my dying just / as yours will be / a whip to sorrow / ‘cause tears won’t build / a body / & you are on the lips / the angry skin of life / that calls tomorrow.”) Vera Montgomery’s indignant poem (see Players, Games) about her sisters’ failure to seize their common cause sits squarely in this tradition. Matching the proud attention to cultural specificity fostered by the black consciousness movement was that of Latinos — Puerto Rican Young Lords in the Northeast and Chicago, Chicanos in the Southwest and California — represented here by Raymond Ringo Fernandez and Jimmy Santiago Baca.
    Some early PEN prison poetry reflected the “toast/ 5 an older African-American narrative in ballad form that my penitentiary students had introduced to me. Passed from performer to performer in jails, toasts glorify the “life 95 (of con games, pimping, and other hustles). The toast’s flamboyant hyperbole persists In the “lies” and tall tales that enliven yard culture, and its rhythmic insistence is one of the sources of rap music and hiphop.
    Established white poets are also woven into the literary culture of our lockups; dead white men (and a few women, notably Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath) are revitalized by writers who draw on their energy to their own emergencies. Chuck Culhane says he read Whitman and Ginsberg in that spirit, and it shows in the voices of “After Almost Twenty