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Between 1982 and 2000, California built twenty-three new prisons and, Gilmore found, increased the state’s prison population by 500 percent. [...] Gilmore outlines four categories of “surplus” to explain the prison-building boom. There was “surplus land,” because farmers didn’t have enough water to irrigate crops, and economic stagnation meant the land was no longer as valuable. As the California government faced lean years, it was left with what she calls “surplus state capacity”—government agencies that had lost their political mandate to use funding and expertise for social-welfare benefits (like schools, housing, and hospitals). In the wake of this austerity, investors specializing in public finance found themselves with no market for projects like schools and housing and instead used this “surplus capital” to make a market in prison bonds. And finally, there was “surplus labor,” resulting from a population of people who, whether from deindustrialized urban centers or languishing rural areas, had been excluded from the economy—in other words, the people from which prison populations nationwide are drawn.
A person who eventually either steals something or assaults someone goes to prison, where he is offered no job training, no redress of his own traumas and issues, no rehabilitation. “The reality of prison, and of black suffering, is just as harrowing as the myth of slave labor,” Gilmore says. “Why do we need that misconception to see the horror of it?” Slaves were compelled to work in order to make profits for plantation owners. The business of slavery was cotton, sugar, and rice. Prison, Gilmore notes, is a government institution. It is not a business and does not function on a profit motive. This may seem technical, but the technical distinction matters, because you can’t resist prisons by arguing against slavery if prisons don’t engage in slavery. The activist and researcher James Kilgore, himself formerly incarcerated, has said, “The overwhelming problem for people inside prison is not that their labor is super exploited; it’s that they’re being warehoused with very little to do and not being given any kind of programs or resources that enable them to succeed once they do get out of prison.”
“Abolition,” as a word, is an intentional echo of the movement to abolish slavery. “This work will take generations, and I’m not going to be alive to see the changes,” the activist Mariame Kaba told me. “Similarly I know that our ancestors, who were slaves, could not have imagined my life.” And as Kaba and Davis and Richie and Gilmore all told me, unsolicited and in almost identical phrasing, it is not serendipity that the movement of prison abolition is being led by black women. Davis and Richie each used the term “abolition feminism.” “Historically, black feminists have had visions to change the structure of society in ways that would benefit not just black women but everyone,” Davis said. She also talked about Du Bois and the lessons drawn from his conception of what was needed: not merely a lack of slavery but a new society, utterly transformed. “I think the fact that so many people now do call themselves prison abolitionists,” Michelle Alexander told me, “is a testament to the fact that an enormous amount of work has been done, in academic circles and in grassroot circles. Still, if you just say ‘prison abolition’ on CNN, you’re going to have a lot of people shaking their heads. But Ruthie has always been very clear that prison abolition is not just about closing prisons. It’s a theory of change.”
For Gilmore, to “never forget” means you don’t solve a problem with state violence or with personal violence. Instead, you change the conditions under which violence prevailed. Among liberals, a kind of quasi-Christian idea about empathy circulates, that we have to find a way to care about the people who’ve done bad. To Gilmore this is unconvincing. When she encountered the kids in Fresno who hassled her about prison abolition, she did not ask them to empathize with the people who might hurt them, or had. She instead asked them why, as individuals, and as a society, we believe that the way to solve a problem is by “killing it.” She was asking if punishment is logical, and if it works. She let the kids find their own way to answer.
[...] Alex’s paintings, meticulous renderings of pixelated or otherwise fragmented images, were each the result of hundreds or even thousands of hours of work, technically precise and meditatively, masochistically obsessive. His source material was imagery that had a “specific emptiness”—travel brochures, postcards, amateur pornography. “Turning [these images] into formal arrangements of color, pattern, and repeated form,” he told Hudson in 1998, “becomes a sublimation, a ritual that allows me to enter their profound vapidity.” The frame of mind needed to make this work seems to have required a big buffer of loneliness, which Alex successfully located in Des Moines. He could stay there and paint, and Hudson, whose gallery was entering its heyday, would be his lifeline. That was the arrangement.
oooh i like this [painter alex brown]
I never wrote about most of the people from the Blue Lamp. If I transformed them into fiction I might lose my grasp on the real place, the evidence of which has otherwise evaporated. The bar is gone. All those people have died. That might be why. Or perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. The person who writes about her experience is not the same person who had the experience. The ability to write about it is proof of change, of great distance. Not everyone is willing to admit this, but it’s true.
As I said, I was the soft one. Maybe that’s why I was so desperate to escape San Francisco, by which I mean desperate to leave a specific world inside that city, one I felt I was too good for and, at the same time, felt inferior to. I had models that many of my friends did not have: educated parents who made me aware of, hungry for, the bigger world. But another part of my parents’ influence was this bohemian idea that real meaning lay with the most brightly alive people, those who were free to wreck themselves. I admired a lot of these people I’m describing to you. I put them above myself in a hierarchy that is reestablished in the fact that I am the one who lived to tell.
I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine. To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, to not dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home. And then I left for good, left San Francisco. My friends all stayed. But the place still defined me as it has them.
“Poetry”: What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within. What kind of art has as a condition of its possibility a perfect contempt? And then, even reading contemptuously, you don’t achieve the genuine. You can only clear a place for it—you still don’t encounter the actual poem, the genuine article. Every few years an essay appears in a mainstream periodical denouncing poetry or proclaiming its death, usually blaming existing poets for the relative marginalization of the art, and then the defenses light up the blogosphere before the culture, if we can call it a culture, turns its attention, if we can call it attention, back to the future. But why don’t we ask: What kind of art is defined—has been defined for millennia—by such a rhythm of denunciation and defense? Many more people agree they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it, and have largely organized my life around it (albeit with far less discipline and skill than Marianne Moore) and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are for me—and maybe for you—inextricable.
Allen Grossman, whose reading of Caedmon I’m pirating here, abstracts from this story (and there are many versions of this story) a harsh lesson: Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented (e.g., the creation of representation itself), but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure. There is an “undecidable conflict” between the poet’s desire to sing an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it, the “resistance to alternative making inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed.” In an essay on Hart Crane, Grossman develops his notion of a “virtual poem”—what we might call poetry with a capital “P,” the abstract potential of the medium as felt by the poet when called upon to sing—and opposes it to the “actual poem,” which necessarily betrays that impulse when it joins the world of representation.
also quoted in Salvage
If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet, they will often describe for you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school; I dabbled in college. Almost never do they write it now. They will tell you they have a niece or nephew who writes poetry. These familiar encounters—my most recent was at the dentist, my mouth propped open while Dr. X almost gagged me with a mirror, as if searching for my innermost feelings—have a tone that’s difficult to describe. There is embarrassment for the poet—couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?—but there is also embarrassment on the part of the non-poet, because having to acknowledge one’s total alienation from poetry chafes against the early association of poem and self. The ghost of that romantic conjunction makes the falling away from poetry a falling away from the pure potentiality of being human into the vicissitudes of being an actual person in a concrete historical situation, your hands in my mouth. I had the sensation that Dr. X, as he knocked the little mirror against my molars, was contemptuous of the idea that genuine poetry could issue from such an opening. And Dr. X was right: There is no genuine poetry; there is only, after all, and at best, a place for it.