Love Letters to Poetry | Art & Abolition
When I first heard about prison abolition, I had a fairly common, knee-jerk reaction: “No prisons? What about all the rapists? What about all the pedophiles?” Black feminist icon Angela Davis has been a hero of mine for decades but even her leadership role within the movement didn’t immediately convince me of its legitimacy. It has taken several years and more reading of Davis and other abolitionists for me to understand what a prison-free society could look like in the United States.
I am still surprised (and somewhat ashamed) of the way my imagination simply shut down at the possibility of a world without prisons. I have spent most of my life writing poetry, plays, novels, and picture books for young readers; I earn a living writing fantasy fiction precisely because I have the ability to dream up alternate realities. And yet instead of embracing abolition as an opportunity to create a more just world, I dismissed the idea outright. My imagination wasn’t “limitless,” as I had believed. Instead I had internalized ideas about criminality and policing that diminished my capacity to understand, envision, and experience true liberation. This was a sobering realization.
In February I self-published my third collection of poems. Perennial picks up where my second collection left off; self-published in October 2020, at the height of the pandemic, American Phoenix closes with a poem about the police killing of Breonna Taylor. As I edited the sixty poems I had decided to include in Perennial, I was struck by my growth over the past two years. As I read “The Last Prison,” written at the end of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) in 2021, I could see how I wasn’t ready then to accept civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer’s assertion that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
If prisons are abolished, what will we do with “killer cops”? Here again my imagination faltered. There won’t be a need for that sort of prison—or any other—if we create a society where all life is valued, and all communities are served and protected equally.
Last month I was horrified to learn that the illustrator of my spring picture book, A Song for Juneteenth, had been charged with abusing a minor. I admire the young woman’s courage in coming forward and hope she will find a way to heal. But do I trust the Illinois courts to give survivors the justice they deserve? Not really. Judges and juries in the US almost never hold accountable police officers guilty of killing unarmed Black people in this country; cops are rarely even indicted despite their own body-cam footage and eye-witness testimony. So why cling to a criminal justice system that is committed to mass incarceration but utterly disinterested in rehabilitation? Imagine what might happen if our collective creative energy and resources instead went towards healing communities plagued by poverty and inequality. It could happen if more of us dared to dream of a world with less violence and more compassion. I believe artists—and poets in particular—can (and should) lead the way.
I spent most of March in the UK conducting research on Scotland’s involvement in the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean. After publishing Perennial, I didn’t feel inspired to write any new poems but when I arrived in Glasgow, I decided to write a poem a day in preparation for NaPoWriMo. Mostly I wrote several haikus every evening as a way of documenting my impressions and discoveries. A haiku is like a nugget that can later be mined and extended into a longer poem; its form requires me to wrestle with complex contradictions using just three lines and seventeen syllables.
dead men pose on plinths
their proud profiles anointed
by perching pigeons
Sometimes I wrote “suites,” linking haikus in the style of Sonia Sanchez:
sunlight seduces
the heart smoldering with rage,
turning pain to ash
yet our ancestors
labored beneath blazing suns;
their fury flourished
so guard your anger
against birdsong and blossoms—
beauty can block blame
Spending three weeks in Scotland was part of an experiment. All of my poetry books respond to police-involved killings of African Americans, including the picture book A Place Inside of Me, the young adult collection Say Her Name, and Moonwalking, the middle-grade verse novel I co-authored with Lyn Miller-Lachmann. This year I have vowed not to write about Black death, trying instead to train my gaze on other things. But can I live as a poet in the US and responsibly refuse to document the racism that destroys so many Black lives?
For now, I am consciously focusing on the many ways Black people have resisted dehumanization in the past and present. By the end of April, I hope to have thirty new poems that point readers to a future free of prisons or police brutality. I aspire to become an abolitionist artist, imagining a world where liberation really is for everyone.
