- 1 The Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison started in 1996. It is an “on-site, degre (...)
1Cécile: Michelle, you are a writer, author of Reading with Patrick, a memoir of teaching and friendship between a young teacher, yourself, and an incarcerated teenage student in a jail of Phillips County, Arkansas; you worked as an immigrants’ rights lawyer. You taught courses at San Quentin prison in San Francisco through the Prison University Project1, and after living in the United States and France, you moved to Taiwan, where you are a visiting professor at National Chengchi University and you teach at a juvenile detention facility.
- 2 Albert Wu was an assistant professor in the department of history and politics at AUP.
2Thomas: Hannah, you are a Clinical Fellow at the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at the American University of Paris (AUP), and you are the co-founder of AUP’s innovative prison education workshops, where students learn from and with incarcerated people, and participate in workshops led and co-led by teachers, activists, and creators who have experienced incarceration. You’re also the president of the non-profit, Dialogue & Transformation, that emerged from this collaboration. In classes, community service projects, and faculty seminars, you have developed innovative and dialogue-based programs. And with Michelle and Albert Wu2, in fall 2019, you designed a course that brings together traditional college students and incarcerated people at La Santé prison.
3Thank you both for making the time for this conversation. Our first question is very simple: How did you both come to W.S. Merwin?
4Michelle: I actually met Merwin in 2006. It was at a conference in Hawaii. He had such a presence! I remember him talking about childhood and describing ignorance as a form of wisdom—that children possess this wisdom. Everybody was captivated.
5Cécile: Would you mind telling us about your project—teaching W.S. Merwin in prison—and how come you chose Merwin?
- 3 “The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program® is an educational program with an innovative pedagogical a (...)
- 4 Walls to Bridges (W2B) classes are for-credit courses offered through universities and colleges tau (...)
6Hannah: For years, before meeting Michelle, I wanted to figure out a way to do an Inside Out3 program in France. I contacted Inside Out programs in the States. It’s a really beautiful model where there are, say, ten university students and ten people detained at the prison who come together in the classroom and work together. Having seen the power of it, I had always dreamed of doing it in France. I was teaching a class at AUP in 2019, where I met Albert and Michelle, and they said they would really like to do something in prison, and I thought, here’s what we’ll do. I did a training at a Canadian institution called Walls to Bridges4, in which the training takes place in a women’s prison. It is co-led by women who are incarcerated and professors and students and other speakers. There is a huge influence of indigenous Canadian culture which incorporates the notion of circle pedagogy, respect, and mutuality. The idea is to transform the notion of why we go into prison: it’s not so much that “we’re coming in to help you” or “we’ve got something precious, and we will now give it to you.” Rather, it’s to create a situation in which people are learning in unusual ways.
7I often say that I think my interest in prison partly started because when I was a child, my father was incarcerated during the McCarthy era after refusing to testify for the House Committee of Un-American Activities. He chose to contest the HUAC’s investigation, arguing that the First Amendment protected free speech and association, but he lost his case. He lost his job, was blacklisted in the American academic world, and went to jail. This has meant that when I go into a prison, I hark back to a positive childhood memory, the memory of visiting my Dad. It gives me a strange feeling of elation when I go into a jail. I remember how important and moving and reassuring it was to go with my family and visit him. These childhood experiences also made me want to know more about what prison is and why people are locked up.
8So, I did this training, which was a training also in how to teach differently and how to be with people differently. I remember thinking that knowledge was very physical, very inclusive, very playful; it helped me to break down the criteria that academia often creates in order to allow people to communicate about what they know. It really influenced me a lot, and so when I started working with Michelle and Albert, I said, this is how we’re going to do it: we’re going to sit in a circle and start like this…
9Our first class was based on the idea of reading together and then imitating short texts, in English and French. We read everything in both languages. The first time we did it, and every time I have taught with Michelle since, it has been bilingual; now it’s increasingly multilingual. But I also do the class in French, which is quite different and interesting. So, at the beginning, we were just reading short texts, and then Michelle developed this process of encouraging reactions to the text as well as imitating the text. And everything that we did was always in groups, what I call inside-outside groups. Michelle would write questions about a text; and then we would be in groups of two, where it would be an inside student and an outside student sharing; and then the writing would also be in mixed groups and in both languages. The very first time we did the class, we also were encouraging people to translate each other’s texts.
10Michelle: For me, Merwin’s poetry is particularly wonderful to teach in prison. I started teaching Merwin a long time ago, in Arkansas county jail, when I was teaching Patrick, a teenage student of mine who had gotten into a fight and killed someone. We would recite “To Paula in Late Spring” every day, and the poem became a sort of liturgy. We both knew it by heart:
Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were (Merwin, 2013 588)
And that was the way we started the day, and then, we would read other texts. We would read Frederick Douglass, or we would read writing by Marilynne Robinson and James Baldwin. But I often thought about Merwin in prison, why he worked so well in prison, and I think it has to do with his different interpretation of time. And actually, as I write in my book, the first time we read this poem, I asked Patrick what his favorite line was. He said, “we will be no older than we ever were.” The line made him think of his mother; he could picture them together, in a place where time didn’t matter and had just stopped.
11So much of being in prison is about obsession with time. When you talk to someone who’s been in prison, they’ll tell you exactly how long they were there—not in years, not even in months, but down to the days. Not sixteen years, but sixteen years, five months, and three days. Because they count every moment. You mention this in your essay, “L’éblouissement de l’ombre,” too—this attempt to escape from clock time, to find a way of measuring time that exists outside of clock time. Clock time is a defining aspect of prison life, not to mention law. And then, in the context of the Mississippi Delta, other layers of time are at play. For instance, Patrick reflects on his relationship to slavery; he’s surrounded by acres of cotton field that were never returned to the people who worked them. People often say that this impoverished area feels like a “time warp.” In Merwin we find relief from time as it’s experienced.
12To go back to what we were doing at La Santé, we would have imitations of the poem “Separation,” a poem that I started teaching at San Quentin Prison:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color. (Merwin, 1963 9)
13Hannah: It was the first poem that we did when we came into La Santé. It was also the very first day of class, not to mention the first time we had ever done the project and the first time we had ever worked together. We wanted to do something very short to start. And I actually translated it. I’m not a translator! I will never forget it, because there was something about coming in with this particular poem, on the very first day… Obviously, everybody who is in prison is experiencing separation, but also all of us experience it. So, it really epitomizes for me the way that what we do doesn’t put people in a different category. Everybody has experience, it’s not like you have experience, we have knowledge. No, we all have experience and we all have knowledge, and we all have the experience of separation. And it is also neat to start something with separation.
14Michelle: And it’s such a simple poem. We have taught these imitations in different ways, but we might start by having people all imitate the gesture of sewing. Everybody has a different way of sewing. Some people actually know how to sew, or they remember their mother sewing; other people pretend to use a machine. So, we ask them to think about a gesture. We have prompts, like: what do you feel when you imitate the gesture? And they’ll have different emotions. Maybe you’re sewing for somebody else, they’ll say, or maybe you’re doing something you’ve done for a very long time, or maybe you’re doing something your grandma or grandpa taught you. There are emotions and memories embedded in these words and gestures, a sense of constancy and maybe tenderness in what lasts and what we remember.
15And then, we’ll ask them to consider another gesture or motion or task that sewing recalls; some of them will say “cooking” or “fixing their child’s hair” or gardening. And then, we have them think about somebody else in their life: what gesture or task does that person do? Then, they’re tasked with writing the poem using these prompts. People do really well with limitations, as Oulipo teaches us. We’ll tell them the imitation has to have fewer than twenty words; it has to have three lines…
16Hannah: The title has to be one word…
17Michelle: So, we did a variation on this, actually just this morning, with “Summer Sky” in Garden Time. We don’t show them the poem at the start, but rather prompts related to the poems. Sometimes, we have them write words or ideas on post-it notes rather than paper, because it’s a little less likely to trigger bad memories from school. And then we have them post-it notes on a long canvas-like paper that we’ve taped to the wall.
18For the imitation of “Separation,” we asked them to choose one word that would be the title of their poem.
19Hannah: But this is tricky. So, we had them read an extract from Malcolm X, his autobiography, who talks about how he taught himself to read by reading the dictionary (175). It’s about two pages, how he started with aardvark and so on. We brought dictionaries in many different languages, from French to Arabic to English to Spanish, and then, we gave them a prompt to choose words. We didn’t say they were going to be for a poem. I actually really like doing it this way, because people are so unselfconscious. So, they choose words in different categories, and then, we spread the poem on the page…
20Michelle: …and we read the poem, and so, they have the words already to make the poem. They’re not just staring at a blank page. Some of them immediately took off and knew exactly what they wanted to do, and others were taking words from other people. And then they write a poem…
21Now, a question about Merwin to you: Why does he lend himself to being modeled so well? Others don’t. I have shared Emily Dickinson with people, and they really love it. They love “I’m Nobody! Who are you” (Fr. 260, 116). But you can’t imitate it, it’s so particular! Now, there is a quality of Merwin that—you put it so well in your essay—creates a sense of traces, distilling experience of life to words that resonate or that carry some sort of force, or remind you of the fleetingness. It’s so lovely, I feel, because it’s so silenced or silent. You’re not asking these people to confess or to explain the terrible things in their lives. There is a mysteriousness to the speaker in his poems, and those imitating his poems can also retain their mystery.
22So then, today we taught “Summer Sky,” and it has that similar quality, but it is twice as long as “Separation.” This time, we gave them other prompts.
Summer Sky
July with sun-filled leaves drifting among the butterflies
I have been coming to this morning light since the day I was born
I saw its childhood as I sat alone in silence by the high window
no one else saw it no one else would ever recognize it
it is the same child now who watches the clouds change
they appear from out of sight and change as the moment
passes through them (Merwin, 2016 17)
Ciel d’été
Juillet aux feuilles gorgées de soleil glissant parmi les papillons
je viens à cette lumière du matin depuis le jour où je suis né
j’ai vu son enfance assis solitaire près de la fenêtre haute
nul autre n’a vu nul autre ne reconnaîtrait cela même
c’est le même enfant qui maintenant regarde les nuages changer
ils surgissent hors la vue et changent quand le moment
à travers eux passe (Merwin, 2022 39)
23Hannah: I really liked the way Michelle did it. Before we showed them the poem, she had four different colored little squares, and each one was for a different kind of word. So, you’re generating just words that you can play with afterwards.
24Michelle: So, on one post-it note, a student would write a season they like or remember. For the second prompt, they’d write down an image or word they can see or touch or smell during the season. For the third, they’d write an action that they’ve done all their lives. That one is a little obscure, I think; a few people got stuck and others just ran with it. After that, we’d read the poem together, first in French and then English. We divided up into pairs to discuss our favorite lines. I had such a lovely conversation. The two people in my group instantly had favorite lines. One said he loved this line:
I have been coming to this morning light since the day I was born
I wish I could remember exactly how he put it, but he said it reminded him of this sense of having always done one thing even when there is so much change in his life.
25The other student loved this line:
it is the same child now who watches the clouds change
And he said he loved it for the same reason as his classmate—that there’s something inside him or about him that has stayed the same. It’s so moving when people are just immediately drawn to a particular choice of words.
26Cécile: It’s a difficult poem, in fact. When we translated it, I remember we had a discussion about “its” in the third line.
I saw its childhood as I sat alone in silence at the high window
Whose childhood is it?
27Michelle: I would love to hear what you were thinking. What did you find difficult? I’m curious. I feel like we didn’t discuss the meaning too much, right, Hannah? But I would love to hear you talk about the meaning.
28Cécile: For us, I remember, it was one of the Wordsworthian poems. And we discussed indeed whose childhood it was, and we decided that it was the childhood of the light. And also, I love the simple present in the last line
they appear from out of sight and change as the moment passes
through them
It is an ephemerality that constantly passes…
29Hannah: That’s really beautiful the way you did it.
30Cécile: We disagreed with the editor about this one poem, because the last line should obviously be visually longer than the others. This ephemerality lasts, and the line is longer in English. But they cut the line short in the French translation…
31Thomas: Yes, the real basic thing is that they decided that they wanted the titles to be left justified and the poems to be in the center of the page. That is not the way it was in English. It was just their template and they didn’t want to change the template for that one page. But we had a good point for that line, which is not passing, which is going on and on and on. It needed to be on one line, but we couldn’t win that battle.
32Michelle: That’s amazing. I wish I could tell the students about this, just to say that these are the kinds of arguments that are about meaning.
33Thomas: The poem is about a simple idea: we’re still five years old; we’re still two years old; it’s not the clock time temporality.
34Michelle: That makes me think of the loveliest conversation I had this morning. (There are people who speak a little English, so it is easier for me.) One of them, who is in his sixties, said, “On the last day I live, I will still be a child.” When we asked him to write one imitation of Merwin, he replied, just one?—he had five poems in him! He said he wanted to write about growing up in Algeria and being five years old, standing on the balcony and smelling the rain hit the dust. And he said, “I can see it right now; I can smell the rain touching the dust; I was with my sister.”
35But the poem he wrote took place in September (and Merwin’s is in July). He remembered picking figs and grapes with his mother and father, and his last line switched from the past to the present tense. It said something like: “I am that same child and never want to grow up.” My little group talked a lot about seasons, how they bring you back to this feeling of being a child, especially summer, and how the seasons are always the same. And I like how Merwin gave us a new way to think about time, as opposed to the repetitive anxiety of “I’m wasting time; time is piling up; is a judge going to give me back the time?”
36As an aside: the fear of not getting back time is especially typical in a maison d’arrêt. Let’s say you’ve been detained for a year and two months, and then you finally have your trial (or your date with the judge). The judge might decide that you’re free to leave and sentence you to exactly a year and two months. Why does the sentence work out so perfectly? Well, if the judge actually determines your crime only merited a three-month sentence rather than the full time you served, then the state has to pay you back for the extra time you spent. So, detained people are anxious about losing time that they’ll never get back—and that will never get acknowledged as having been lost.
37Hannah: Just to go back one step, I’m interested in sharing the conversation I had around this poem.
38Michelle: I would love to hear it, because I don’t get to hear your discussions.
39Cécile: So, you’re in separate rooms?
40Hannah: No, we’re in separate groups. So, let’s go back to the part about what’s your favorite line. So, his favorite favorite line was
son enfance assis solitaire près de la fenêtre haute
and he completely understood the mystery of that line: whose “son enfance”? whose childhood? And actually, I realized just listening to you talk that during the poem we migrate from it being the light’s childhood to it being our childhood as we read the poem. Because everybody ends up in the end feeling that it’s their childhood. And yet, we go line by line, and when we’re in this line, we are surprised: the light’s childhood? Wait a minute, and what’s this high window? And that’s what he was saying at first.
41And then, I said my favorite line was
nul autre n’a vu nul autre ne reconnaîtrait cela même
It’s interesting for me because I read the poem in English and I loved the English, but then, when I’m talking to the people detained at La Santé, I’m going to be reading your words in translation. So, suddenly, I’m reading a different word, and he said, why do you like that? And I answered, well, because, how can you ever really know what the other person is seeing? They’re seeing something completely different, and, suddenly, I’m staring at him. And I said, here I am. I’m looking at you and here’s what I’m seeing. I’m seeing this person on the wall behind you and you’re looking at me and you're seeing some lady speaking with an accent. And so, we’re not seeing the same thing, even though we’re right both here. And then, we got into this amazing conversation, because he said, “But we are still sort of seeing the same thing.” It was really incredible. We were both looking at each other. And he said, I can sort of tell what you’re feeling from your eyes. And well, it’s true, I told him, you know, if somebody smiles, then we smile. If somebody yawns, then we yawn. We’re animals. So, we do sort of know, but then, we also don’t. And so, in the end, why I love that line is because it is such a recognition of the uniqueness of each person’s experience. And this is exactly what we’re trying to build in the whole project—the idea that each person’s experience matters and is precious. And that’s in that line for me. But he transformed it into, “But we do still sort of know, we are in the same spot, even though we’re not in the same spot.” It was really amazing.
42Cécile: Yes, and that’s what we often read in Merwin’s poetry. What we are sharing is our singularity. This is the thing that we are the most certain about, each of us is singular. The words “one,” “only,” “each” are everywhere to be found in the collection, but every one of us can share this feeling of being unique.
43Thomas: What we share is that we, each one of us, have a separate experience, but each separate experience is identical in its being different from all the others. What we share is that we are separate.
44Hannah: Exactly. It’s paradoxical. What we’re sharing is that we all experience our own uniqueness and specialness.
45Cécile: And that’s what you did when choosing “Separation” as the first poem you read. The separation is in fact what we are sharing.
46Hannah: That’s beautiful.
47Thomas: Think about the share, and also in French partage. To share/shear also means to cut with scissors; sharing presupposes those cuts.
48Hannah: That’s interesting. So, we can’t share anything if we’re not willing to cut anything.
49Thomas: That’s the partage.
50Hannah: That’s nice, and I really like the way you translated the last line, the way you ended it with “passe.” That’s really beautiful.
ils surgissent hors la vue et changent quand le moment à travers eux passe
It’s so open. Merwin ended it on “them.” He didn’t end it with “passe.”
51Cécile: You said that it was very different in translation and in English. Can you explain?
52Hannah: Well, I was thinking about that particular line, because, well, in my own language
no one else saw it no one else would ever recognize it
I find that extremely moving, because I feel there’s a kind of a loneliness in it. I find, and the other person I was talking to also finds, that something about the high window is very lonely; it’s like you’re sitting almost in an alcove and the window’s high, or it’s high, and so “no one else would ever recognize it.” But then, in French
nul autre n’a vu nul autre ne reconnaîtrait cela même
The word reconnaître feels differently to me than “recognize.” To me, recognize feels like “no one else would ever realize what it was.” When I hear it in French, to me, it feels more like “recognize” in the other sense.
53Thomas: In the sense of “acknowledge”?
54Hannah: Why did you put “même”?
55Cécile: Well, we had trouble translating the word “it,” which is everywhere in the collection, and in particular, we had trouble with monosyllables. I couldn’t tell you exactly now why we eventually came up with this version, but what I am seeing today with you is that we chose to repeat “même” in French: “le même enfant” / “cela même,” because we wanted to keep the repetition effect of a monosyllable in French.
56Thomas: He’s been coming to this light; he doesn’t see the morning light in line two, there’s no vision there, and then he doesn’t see the morning light in line three, he sees that the light has turned into something else. And so, when reading “no one else saw it” I assume “it” is the “it” of the morning light. There’s a difference between the pure light, the phenomenon, and its metaphor, childhood. So which one is the “it” in “no one else saw it”? I would say it’s already one of two things at that point. And instead of “cela même,” we could have said, “Nul autre ne l’a vu nul autre ne le reconnaîtrait.” But with the “cela même,” it’s possible that we were emphasizing the fact that the phenomenon that he is describing is split between line two and three. And when it comes back in line four, which one is it of those two? Is it the light of the morning, or is it the childhood, the childhood of that light?
57Hannah: I totally understand what you’re saying. I just wanted to say something that I felt I really learned from you, Michelle, when you teach these poems, which is about the mystery in the poems, something which is so hard to pin down. And I remember when we taught “Separation” last summer, and Michelle asked: who’s speaking? and who is he speaking to? People were sitting there, having suffered through the French educational system, thinking, am I going to say the wrong thing? Is this teacher going to get mad at me? And finally, somebody raised their hand and said, we don’t know. And, Michelle, you said poems have mystery in them, and they open things up, and you don’t need to know, and I feel like that every time we’ve done, you’ve done the poems… It’s been so much of an opening to people and the opposite of everything that I dislike about the educational system, in France or anywhere, where there’s just one answer, and you have to get it right, and the teacher knows it, and you don’t know it. But you said that’s what poetry is, poetry is mystery.
58Michelle: And I always tell them, you can hide. I think it is such a relief for somebody forced to write. You know, you can hide here, there’s an art to hiding. We’re not asking everybody a biography. And sometimes we know the students (just like writers) mess with us, and that’s okay.
59Hannah: Yes, you mean sometimes they’re making fun of us…
60Michelle: And that’s fine, that’s fine…
61Cécile: Or making up their own memories…?
62Hannah: But I think, as Michelle was saying, they’re often asked to produce their story. And even though there’s a lot to be said about the importance of people telling their stories, we don’t ask people to tell their story, because that’s what they’re being told over and over again to do. Retell your story. Tell your story differently, so that it sounds better, so that you sound like a better person. And then what happened? We just don’t do that.
63Thomas: It makes me think of an interesting interview of Merwin by Bill Moyers. Moyers asks something to him, and Merwin answers, well, you know Bill, I don’t know… There is so much we don’t know. [Laughs.] We only know a little tiny bit compared to all there is…
64Michelle: And another thing we also say is: if you would like to give this, your poem, to somebody, or think of it as a gift, who would you give it to? Because who is the speaker writing to in the Merwin poem?
your absence has gone through me…
One common source of despair for people with limited resources is the inability to give something to others. And so, the idea that they’re writing to somebody is important. And several people told me they were writing for their child or for their mother or for a friend, and it gives them an ability to be generous, which is so lovely, right? The poem is a gift that they can create.
65Cécile: Have you done “The Present” with them? The last poem of Garden Time (69)? It’s about giving, and giving the moment.
66Michelle: I actually photocopied that one, and then we didn’t get to it. It’s such a beautiful poem.
67You know, one thing that we really love about our class is that it doesn’t require some formal educational level, like a high school diploma.
68Hannah: We’re actually considered to be a “cultural activity.” We’re not in the education part of the prison, so we can accept anybody. The first time we taught the class we had some people who didn’t really know French.
69As I said, I also do the class in French, so it takes shape differently. I read longer texts and we go farther with discussion. We also act things out. We’ll read a text, and then move around the room, and people will take different positions regarding the text using their bodies or act out different characters in the text.
70Cécile: Sorry to repeat myself, but I really think you should do “The Present”! Because at some point the poem says,
and when their hands met
they laughed
This could be performed.
71Thomas: Yes, let me add just a little kind of professor type of thing that can be helpful for people, students, or anybody to discover. The poem goes couplet, couplet, tercet—so, two lines, two lines, three lines. But the last three lines are split, and where are they split?
72Hannah: Oh, when the hands touch?
73Thomas: Yes… So that’s interesting. You might pass over that, it is something interesting to bring out to students.
74Michelle: That is great. It is helpful for imitations, because they love having little structural limitations.
75Thomas: So, it should be a tercet, but it is ruptured at the moment that their hands touch.
76Cécile: And they miss the present…
77Hannah: I like this.
you will not be able to keep it
but you will not be able
to keep anything
That made my hair stand up. That’s really beautiful.
78Cécile: Do you think you will continue to teach Merwin in prison? Sorry, not “teaching,” because I understand, this is not a class.
79Hannah: Yes, we consider it to be mutual learning. I consider it to be, well, our hands meeting…
80Michelle: That’s so lovely.
81Hannah: Well, that’s sort of where I’m coming from. My expectation is simple: it’s for us to meet. I remember the very first day of class when we put up our ethical approach on a big sheet of canvas paper. People can write things like “respect,” “don’t interrupt each other,” “confidentiality.” I put … “being together.” And then they were like “what does this mean?” It’s nothing, but it’s all I’m really trying to do—just to allow for some kind of meeting…
82Michelle: …which is so Merwin. Being together, being present, like really present, seeing how other people see, accepting space between us.
83Hannah: That’s really what I’m trying to do…
84Michelle: I don’t have any illusions that we are totally transforming lives, but when you talk to people inside, they say it really matters to see people from the outside, to have visitors come.
85Hannah: I didn’t mean to say that what we’re doing isn’t really important just because it’s so simple. It matters a lot to people, and for every class there’s this sort of moment when, around the 4th or 5th or 6th or 7th class, I look around and think, wow, it worked. Each time I think, maybe it won’t work this time, and then, there’s this moment near the end when somebody from the inside will say, this really matters a lot. And it matters a lot to the AUP students too, because they’re also crossing a border, and they’re also finding a new way of touching and a new way of seeing. It’s equally important, or at least that’s the idea…
86Cécile: Thank you very much, Hannah, for sharing this with us. [Hannah has to leave.]
87Michelle: But to go back to the Moyers interview. Actually, I read it while I was teaching in Arkansas county jail. I would go there almost every day to work with this former student of mine, Patrick, who had ended up in in jail. At some point in the interview, he talks about how poetry begins, when you want to cut through the long vowel of grief… And it felt so literal to me, because in prison you just hear people moaning all the time, you hear this emanation of total grief. And Patrick would complain to me all the time about how he couldn’t focus, he couldn’t read, because it’s so noisy, because people are banging, people moan, and you just feel trapped.
88We were also simultaneously—and this is a tip for people teaching Merwin—teaching with other kinds of prose, so that the Merwin was a relief from the assault of reality that exists within text. We were reading Frederick Douglass for example. So, you can imagine all these different layers of reality: first, there’s the literal reality of being in this completely unsanitary county jail where your jailer also works part-time at McDonald’s and doesn’t know how to administer meds to people; people are getting the wrong meds. And then, you have the second layer of reading Frederick Douglass. So, Patrick is reading about Frederick Douglass, the opening pages of his first autobiography, where he talks about not knowing exactly how old he is. Patrick also realizes that this man taught himself how to read and write, and went from a slave to a world-famous orator. But Patrick, on the other hand, feels like he has committed this crime which is irrevocable; he can’t bring back the man that he killed. So, he feels he lacks the heroism of the person he’s reading.
89So, there are all of these layers, all this confusion. Douglass writes about the slaves surrounding him, describing how they would accept the master’s offer of gin on Christmas Day. Why do the masters give slaves gin? To prove to them that they don’t deserve freedom, because they’ll be stumbling drunk on Christmas. Douglass refuses the gin, but envies their ignorance. And Patrick immediately links those slaves to the people around him, who want quick fixes and don’t believe that they deserve freedom. So, there’s this collapse of time, this confusion, as he wonders how much he is “like” the slaves or not like them. Meanwhile, there’s academic me pressing him with a sociological view of his crime; he grew up in one of the poorest counties in the United States. But he rejects my explanation, because his dignity comes from a refusal to not “blaming” society. Merwin’s poetry is a relief from other texts; for Merwin what matters, what takes primacy, is the “singularity” that Cécile mentions. Then we read Merwin.
90One can picture some naysayer telling me that Douglass is the important choice, and Merwin is the white guy, but that view would be condescending to the reader, who chooses what he finds meaningful—and how to make these texts co-exist.
91So, we read a lot of Shadow of Sirius.
92Cécile: Really? It is difficult.
93Thomas: A couple of days ago, Cécile and I took part in a public reading of Merwin’s poetry in a library in Souillac, in the Lot.5 There were seven or eight different Merwin books available, and there were people saying, I’ve only got twenty euros, which one of the books should I buy? So, there began a discussion about which one you should read first. And some people were saying, oh, but Shadow of Sirius is maybe too hard. So, that’s interesting that you picked up that one to read with Patrick.
94Michelle: Yes. In fact, as I said, we read “To Paula in Late Spring,” and also part of the interview with Moyers, so that Patrick could see the origins of a poem. Because, sometimes the origins of poems are mysterious to people who don’t know writers. So, you remember, Merwin sees Paula in the garden, and he thinks, this is it, I want to spend the rest of my life this way. And then, I would have him write imitations, and he would write a new imitation of this poem every few days, one to his mother—let me imagine that we’re in the mountains—, and then he wrote another one to his daughter… I would bring in all these different nature books, like Arkansas birds and Arkansas trees, and he would pick images from there. And so, this beautiful poem just became part of our writing exercises before we did something else, and it was such a perfect poem for him at least to imitate, because it has all those elements we talked about. You feel like you’re giving a gift to somebody, that you’re being generous, that you’re part of some sort of social fabric. And also, it contains a desire for an alternative life, and I think that, especially for people who’ve committed killing, there’s this constant wish to go back in time. He would talk at night, every night, to his victim’s mother, trying to have a conversation with her. So, there is some repair; I don’t want to be too—what’s the word… dramatic—but there is so much repair in just the act of imagining yourself with another person. And then, the poem itself gives you the kind of structure for how to enact this desire for family or togetherness.
95So I would have him circle all the consonants and underline all the accidents… And Merwin is so good with the r sounds, you know. And then, he would try to do it himself, so he’d be circling “mother” and “mountains” in his own work.
96Thomas: So, he would totally see it and hear it…
97Michelle: Oh yes, he had such a sense of sound, and that’s an interesting quality that I associate with learning a language. You’re really attentive to sound. Patrick knew language of course, but he was away from it; he had dropped out of school for two years.
98Cécile: I find it interesting that you mention how working under constraints or having a structure is important for them to free their imagination, or start, or be a prompt to, their imagining things or creating.
99Michelle: Right. And there’s a double meaning to that, because in prison you find so many people feel more; they feel a concentration of memory, because they have so much idle time. In fact, it depends on the prison. I taught at San Quentin prison, and they had such incredibly busy days, but in other prisons, they just have so much idle time. I taught Merwin outside of prison, and it doesn’t work as well.
100Thomas: Really?
101Michelle: Maybe I wasn’t teaching it well. But prison has older people, especially American prison, and we also have older students in La Santé… Those I was talking about earlier were sixty-year-old men saying, “it is the same child”; they like traveling back to that memory of standing on the balcony, in Algeria, with the rain and the dust, and the other person just always loving summer since he was a child. So, the seasons accumulate meaning; having experienced the same season sixty years is different than twenty years, you know.
102Thomas: Do they have the poem with them during the week? Can they have photocopies, or books in their rooms sometimes?
103Michelle: Not the books, but sometimes they take the papers with them, and it’s always nice when they make a point to take the poem. But I think sometimes the guards check it and take it away. And then, in the U.S., you know, sending books to people in prison is really hard.
104Thomas: I don’t know if I told you, but there was a woman named Katy Ryan who worked with prisoners in West Virginia. She would teach at West Virginia University, and she collected books from all over the place and tried to get them to prisoners, but she said it was so difficult… And, interestingly, the book that is requested the most is the dictionary.
105Michelle: Yes! Everywhere, that’s across the board.
106Cécile: When we were in Souillac, one person in the audience told us that we should read these poems with kids. I’m not sure it would work. What you’re saying about the sedimentation of memory that you find with these older people rather suggests that it wouldn’t work as well.
107Thomas: Was it easy for you, or for Hannah, to jump the hurdles? Or are there hurdles to teaching in prison?
108Michelle: Yes. So, Hannah spent a long time cultivating trust with the person who is in charge of the cultural programs at La Santé. There are so many constraints when you work in a prison. You don’t have the keys, you know, the guards have the keys. So, you could jeopardize the whole program if the guards look in and they see something they don’t like. For instance, we did these skits that Hannah created, which I thought were really great—skits of an instance where they’ve been stereotyped, or when they’ve stereotyped somebody else. Every single Black person in prison, which is the majority, have a story of, you know, being in a rich white neighborhood and being called a thug. There are also other stories, but then when you do the skits, you can’t touch each other. So, there are all these little constraints, and we’re always really anxious, because we want to create this spirit in the classroom where people feel free, where they sense equality with other people. We try not to say stuff that assumes any sort of guilt, for example.
109Cécile: So, you are working under constraints yourselves.
110Michelle: Yes. And there are big questions for prison educators: how much are you collaborating with the system? I’m not over those questions but, you know, when you feel it’s successful, when people are really engaging, when they walk out with a smile on their face… It’s true, though, that we also want to spend our resources and time on changing laws and shortening sentences, etc.
111Would you have any advice on what poems you would use? There are some poems in Garden Time that I would really love to teach like “The Morning” (3). And I’ve also brought “Black Cherries” (10) in, and then I was thinking “The Other House” (34). Though I wouldn’t necessarily bring the latter in, because of that line “as though I were a ghost”, which I worry feels too on the nose in the context of prison. But it’s interesting to think about what poems lend themselves to this sense of equality with the world, because we’re all part of some sort of…
112Thomas: …stardust.
113Michelle: Yes, stardust, yes, I think that’s why the poems work so well anywhere with any thoughtful person, but they work especially well with people whose time has been decided by somebody else. You’re really thinking about how you can take control of your time, and it’s through the imagination and through the use of words.
114Cécile: We also like “Breakfast cup” (2016 31).
115Thomas: “Breakfast cup” would be good to read, I think. It describes a teacup, you know the British teacups where you have a picture of a farm, landscapes…
116Cécile: The poem is an ekphrasis with this little character walking, yet immobile. A sort of “Grecian Urn” poem. He will always be running, but will never get where he wants to go. The tone is both very serious and funny. And then, in terms of imitation, they could choose any other object that they could think of and describe it as well. There’s also “What Can We Call it” (2016 36).
117Thomas: This one is a riddle.
118Cécile: And so, again, that could work as a prompt for imitation.
119Thomas: It’s really a poem where you’re constantly running to grasp the thing, and every time you try to grasp it, it’s going to elude you.
120Michelle: That’s such an amazing poem.
121Thomas: And you could experiment with all sorts of things that “it” could be. It could be this, or it could be that, and the discussion could spring up from there: Well, no, I think it’s this, and here’s why I think it’s that.
122Michelle: That sounds like such a fun discussion to have. What do you think it is? [Laughs.] Finally caught up!
123Cécile: At the end of Garden Time, the poems can be really difficult to understand.
124Thomas: Yes, you get a sense that he is becoming ghostly; he’s becoming no longer material. So that the poems become more and more abstract, ethereal.
125Michelle: Oh yes… I love this one “Voices over Water” (2016 68). This is something I would also share with students. In particular, I would love to share this in Taiwan where spirits are considered part of everyday life. I have met several people who see spirits, and that’s not considered too strange. And then, there are many people who are called pet communicators who can communicate with your pet. So, I wonder how they would interpret this—as more, or less ethereal.
126Anyway, ours is an ongoing project, so we will keep you posted on how it goes in other contexts. I’m excited to think about how to use this in Taiwan. I teach at a juvenile prison in Taiwan and wonder about teaching Merwin to kids. Merwin said that he was proud that children liked his poetry, but I haven’t tried it with children. I guess Patrick was a child, in a sense, eighteen when he committed his crime. But then, I think some feel they grow old quickly when they’re incarcerated.
127Now a question to you: How do you feel Merwin changed you in your daily life?
128Cécile: It did. Not every poem or poet does. But Merwin did.
129Thomas: One thing is salvation from despair and anger and pessimism. It is an essential thing to hang on to, to keep a certain, I don’t know, let’s call it serenity or something like that. That’s definitely a way it’s changed me, yes.
130Michelle: And he carries that despair…
131Thomas: Yes, and he knew really well the state of the ecological situation. But, if you stay there, you’re going to be a really unhappy person, and he doesn’t.
132Cécile: For me, it’s really the “now,” what he does with the present, with the moment, this one and only time that we are living that will always be this one and only time, yet you can remember it, and you can recognize it. So, I like this not capturing, this letting go.
133Thomas: Letting go as the possibility for remembering. You need to let go in order to be able to remember.
134Michelle: What you’ve just said feels like a part of a project of mental freedom that people pursue in prison. It is not realized by every person who comes out or even most people, and it is contingent on so many different factors. But I have met a few people upon release who feel more free than anybody I met, and they always say, I was free before; I was free inside; I got free inside and that’s how I am now. And then, sometimes I ask this to my students in Taiwan: how many of you feel free? Nobody raises their hands. They feel so constricted by all the possible things you can imagine, a really suffocating test-based system, but also climate change, the rise of fascism in the world, China nearby, parental pressures, etc. This idea of being able to see that it is the one and only now, and to find a way around or out of the pessimism you’re talking about, it’s like a mental liberation, and that’s why it feels so profound to share it with people. When they get it, they really get it. And you can do this with words. There’s a belief in mental freedom that underpins this poetry, and that’s what you are talking about both of you—this belief in a singular way of seeing the world for what it really is.
135Thomas: And another thing that I have learned from him is the importance of having some discipline. He was very disciplined, and you have to work for that! It doesn’t just happen. You’ve got to make a kind of effort to keep that mental freedom.
136Michelle: What kind of discipline?
137Thomas: A very regular, daily, routine, if you will.
138Cécile: …like getting up very early, writing, then doing dojo exercises, and then, in the afternoon, he could be open to the world and do some gardening too.
139Michelle: What was in his garden besides roses?
140Thomas: Oh, in Hawaii his garden was palm trees. He planted 14,000 palm trees, and really experimented with different kinds. Because at first he wanted to recreate the native biota, and it didn’t work. Of course, it can’t work. So then, he worked with scientists, as Becker explains.
141Cécile: And one additional thing—Merwin buried letters that were sent to him next to trees, next to palm trees. He probably knew that when you keep a letter, most of the time, you don’t read it again. Some letters you do, but most letters you don’t. And so, he composted them! Burying words… but you don’t kill them, you transform them, or they transform themselves. They become part of the soil and of the tree.
142Michelle: That’s so interesting. I guess it’s similar to what we are saying about words being like a root or a petal or stardust…
143Cécile: It reminds me of the poem that we read in the Souillac library, “Ripe Seeds Falling”:
At home in late summer after the long
spring journeys and their echoing good-byes
at home as the year's seeds begin to fall
each one alone each in its own moment
coming in its blind hope to touch the earth
its recognition even in the dark
knowing at once the place that it has touched
the place where it belongs and came to stay
this is the place that I wanted to hear
to listen to the daylight and the dark
in this moment that has come along with me (2016 42)
The seeds are falling; they touch the earth, or they touch a place but they don’t root, really take root. And that’s what we wanted to tell the audience, a few days before an important election in France. Belonging, being rooted is something, but sometimes it is good to also not be rooted and maybe just touch the earth.
144Michelle: That’s really helpful to me since I don’t feel rooted anywhere anymore.
145Thomas: And the earth is, on the one hand, the soil which is nothing but previously living organisms and, on the other hand, this big gigantic planet. So, touching the earth is touching the geological entity but also just touching the humus that we are. That’s one aspect of this poem…
146Cécile: I’m also struck by the “blind hope” of belonging, the blind hope for the seed “to touch the earth.” The seed is drawn to a place that it has touched, a place where it belongs, but this hope to come back to your own place may also be read as being the blind hope that the poem describes.
147Thomas: And then, you begin to spot things like “long”; “so long”; “belong”; “along”… and you think, wait a minute…
148Cécile: There’s something going on there between temporality, desire, belonging…
149Thomas: …longing, distance.
150Michelle: I love literature professors! Thank you for revealing the secrets of this poem.
151Thomas: It took us a long time to notice that, but Merwin is really good at subtle simple effects that you can easily not notice.
152Michelle: He wears the puzzle lightly; he wears his erudition lightly. It is such a marvelous trait.
153Cécile: And here again, one finds the word “recognition,” which is everywhere in the collection. As in the poem you were teaching, or reading, this morning. And again here, this emphasis on “each one alone.” The book is made up of echoes.
154Michelle: We’re back to this idea of being together; everybody is together, each one alone. But here, this recognition in the dark, knowing at once the place it has touched, the place where it belongs, is so strong.
155Cécile: And then, the poetic voice takes over—“this is the place that I wanted to hear”— instead of the seed, or, in fact, with, or, alongside the seed. As the seed, maybe.
156Michelle: Amazing, thank you, thank you both for translating these poems.
157Cécile: Thank you. It is great to hear how you inhabit the poems, share them, make them grow in different places.
158Michelle: They are so rich, thank you both for translating W.S. Merwin.