☀ What Sparks Poetry: Reginald Dwayne Betts on the Million Book Project

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March 8, 2021

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our occasional series, Building Community, we spotlight connections between our work on the page and our work in the community. In each issue, we pair a poem and writing prompt from our featured poet with an interview that explores what poetry brings to our neighborhoods, cities, and the wider world — and what community makes possible for poetry itself.

If Absence Was the Source of Silence

Reginald Dwayne Betts

some things my sons would never hear,
not from my reluctance to speak,
or the thief that has silenced his mother’s
tongue, his grandmother’s tongue,
turned the stare of the woman who, when
it’s far too early for the sun to be out,
sees me turn a corner with a Newport,
the sky & the ground as dark as the fear
& yesterdays she swallows as she crosses
into what might as well be oncoming traffic,
remembering a man from her past—
stories my sons would not know,
not because of a need to hide history,
those bedrooms & boardrooms & work
where trust became carnage;
no, these things would be Pandora’s box
untouched. & yet, they will know—because.
& the because is what I tell my sons,
about what their hands might do, in long
conversations about what the hands
of men do. Their hands, my own.
When I was twelve, a friend
told me of men offering her money
for her slender & young body, she
no older than me then, arms not strong
enough to carry her own weight, let alone
push her past the men who wanted
to own what is hers. Hers just the first
of a story that would keep returning.
The numbered hurt. Rape, its aftermath
& this account of trauma my boys
would never know if the world differed,
if war did not mean soldiers demanding
the body of a woman as land to plunder.
I keep trying to turn this into sense.
From me, my sons will hear a story about
how hands like theirs, like mine, made
something wretched of the memories
of women we love or don’t know at all. This
is true. & there is a map to take us to
all that hurt. Some silence saying it all. But
let’s say the world is ours. On that day
all the silenced tongues would have
speak, without fear of being doubted,
of the cars & hellos that became dungeons,
of friends who became the darkness
that drowns all until only rage & sadness
remain. & maybe after, we can build
memory that does not demand silence;
all the things that happen now, as if
a part of being, would not be—
& my sons’ lives would be carved
out of days in which their hands
& bodies do not suggest weapons,
days where all their mothers
& sisters can walk down any street
in this world with the freedom
that comes from knowing
you will be safe, after dusk or during
those moments just before dawn
unlike today, & yesterday, & now,
when, the quiet & what might ruin
it, is the threat that circles.

from the book FELON / W. W. Norton & Company

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What Sparks Poetry:
Reginald Dwayne Betts on the Million Book Project
"This is a big and funky and radical project. And so it gets walked out slowly....I think a lot of people who criticize different kinds of projects also don't understand what we mean. We’re putting a million books in prisons, and that's not even what I would imagine to be the kind of scale that I want a project like this to exist on. We want this Freedom Library to serve the same purpose as the libraries you find in people’s homes."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

"Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s Latest Album"
"When I started writing, what began emerging was not just my voice, but the voices around me, which were the voices of indigenous women during this time. In a way, it was a sort of reclamation. And it was the music in poetry, too. I think I’m still doing my mother’s heartbreak songs. Heartbreak for a country. Heartbreak for a tribal nation. And the incredible love for a country or people, too.”
via VANITY FAIR

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