Items related to Disguised As a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San...
When Judith Tannenbaum last met with her poetry writing class at San Quentin prison, one of the students commented, "Now I'm going to give you an assignment: write about these past four years from your point of view; tell your story; let us know what you learned." This beautifully crafted memoir is the fulfillment of that assignment.
In stirring and intimate prose, Tannenbaum details the challenges, rewards, and paradoxes of teaching poetry to maximum-security inmates convicted of capital crimes. Recounting how she and her students shared profound and complicated lessons about humanity and life both inside and outside San Quentin's walls, Tannenbaum tells provocative stories of obsession, racism, betrayal, despair, courage, and beauty. Contrary to the growing public perception of prisoners as demons, the men in this poetry class-Angel, Coties, Elmo, Glenn, Richard, Spoon-emerge not as beasts or heroes but as human beings with expressive voices, thoughts, and feelings strikingly similar to the free.
Tannenbaum provides revealing views of conditions in the cellblocks and shows how the realities of prison life often paralleled her own life experiences. She also relates such events as visits to her group by prominent poets (including Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz); a prison production of Waiting for Godot sponsored by Samuel Beckett himself; and the presentation of her students' work to a class of sixth and eighth graders, who connected to the prisoners' words by writing their own poems to the inmates.
This honest, unbiased account of how one woman artist came to share purpose and inspiration with the prisoners at San Quentin demonstrates the power of human bonds and the power of poetry and other art forms as a means of self-expression and communication within and beyond locked cells.
In stirring and intimate prose, Tannenbaum details the challenges, rewards, and paradoxes of teaching poetry to maximum-security inmates convicted of capital crimes. Recounting how she and her students shared profound and complicated lessons about humanity and life both inside and outside San Quentin's walls, Tannenbaum tells provocative stories of obsession, racism, betrayal, despair, courage, and beauty. Contrary to the growing public perception of prisoners as demons, the men in this poetry class-Angel, Coties, Elmo, Glenn, Richard, Spoon-emerge not as beasts or heroes but as human beings with expressive voices, thoughts, and feelings strikingly similar to the free.
Tannenbaum provides revealing views of conditions in the cellblocks and shows how the realities of prison life often paralleled her own life experiences. She also relates such events as visits to her group by prominent poets (including Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz); a prison production of Waiting for Godot sponsored by Samuel Beckett himself; and the presentation of her students' work to a class of sixth and eighth graders, who connected to the prisoners' words by writing their own poems to the inmates.
This honest, unbiased account of how one woman artist came to share purpose and inspiration with the prisoners at San Quentin demonstrates the power of human bonds and the power of poetry and other art forms as a means of self-expression and communication within and beyond locked cells.
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About the Author:
judith tannenbaum serves as Training Coordinator of the WritersCorps program in San Francisco. For over twenty-five years she has taught poetry to prisoners, primary-age children, continuation high school students, and youngsters at a summer program for gifted teenagers. She has written extensively on issues of community art and cultural democracy and is the author of Teeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes: Writing Poetry in the Primary Grades, The World Saying Yes, four chapbooks, and a portfolio of her poems. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
From Booklist:
Tannenbaum, a poet, teacher, and passionate community art advocate, shares her frank and moving recollections of teaching poetry at San Quentin prison during the 1980s. As she chronicles her demanding routines and indelible revelations in this realm of caged bodies and blazing souls, she articulates her belief that creativity is our birthright, no matter where we reside, and describes the liberating power of poetry as experienced by her students, men who have committed crimes but who write poems of heart-jolting beauty and insight. While Tannenbaum taught her smart, talented, and sensitive students what she knew about writing, they taught her more than she "could ever have imagined about what it is to be human." In a cruel and myopic time in which unlimited funds are allocated for building prisons while schools and the arts go begging, Tannenbaum reminds readers not only that men and women behind bars are human, and therefore deserving of our respect and compassion, but that they have much to tell us about our propensity for both barbarism and beauty. --Donna Seaman Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherNortheastern Univ Pr
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 1555534538
- ISBN 13 9781555534530
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages217
- Rating
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