Spill

Bruce Smith

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226570419
• eBook ISBN: 9780226570556
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"There are two schools: one that sings the sheen and hues, the necessary pigments and frankincense while the world dries and the other voice like water that seeks to saturate, erode, and boil . . . It ruins everything you have ever saved."
            Spill is a book in contradictions, embodying helplessness in the face of our dual citizenship in the realms of trauma and gratitude, artistic aspiration and political reality. The centerpiece of this collection is a lyrical essay that recalls the poet's time working at the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg in the 1960s. Mentored by the insouciant inmate S, the speaker receives a schooling in race, class, and culture, as well as the beginning of an apprenticeship in poetry. As he and S consult the I Ching, the Book of Changes, the speaker becomes cognizant of other frequencies, other identities; poetry, divination, and a synchronous, alternative reading of life come into focus. On either side of this prose poem are related poems of excess and witness, of the ransacked places and of new territories that emerge from the monstrous. Throughout, these poems inhabit rather than resolve their contradictions, their utterances held in tension "between the hemispheres of songbirds and the hemispheres of men."
 

LEWISBURG

By June, by muggy, iffy June of 1968 I had received a draft notice [1-A, report to Fort Dix], a degree in English [undistinguished], and six [or more] concussions from playing college football. I was waiting to be seized by the roots of my hair from the roofs of Philadelphia, where I was working mopping hot tar, and dropped into the jungle, Canada, or jail.

Instead, that July I started work as a teacher at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Work: a chance to find yourself, as Conrad said in Heart of Darkness. But by 1968 Conrad and work were already discredited. Look at our fathers in their ironed shirts. Look at our steaming mothers.

I believed in the thaumaturgical, the wonder work like the kind that snatched my father back from the fiery wreck of WWII and dropped him into an elementary school as a teacher. Seedlings in cups, cutout snowflakes, a rabbit, naps. That summer in Philadelphia I looked into the bubbling cauldron of black pitch in the “Hotmaster” kettle and saw the hell realm black as James Brown’s hair, black as a rice paddy at night. I went to work like a stickup man, in a hat, sunglasses, long sleeves, and a bandana over my face, but still, like Lou Reed sang in “Coney Island Baby,” a kid playing football for the coach. My tar mop was an extension of my mother’s mop, my father’s mop swabbing the decks. In the chimerical heat like jet exhaust shimmering from the roofs I had visions: I would be rescued or translated into vapors or made dead by the voodoo of the age.

The age: Malcolm El-Shabazz dead, MLK, the drum major for peace, for righteousness, dead, RFK dead, fire in the cities, sex, Tet, destroying the town in order to save it, body bags on the runways, one hit then quit shit, mutual pleasure mutual power the marching women said, music painting a thin black lacquer over everything, Otis Redding dead, the great god Brown screaming Please, Aretha demanding “Respect,” OM vibrating in Coltrane’s skull, Philadelphia’s own Delfonics delivering their blows by falsetto.

Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] seemed like a natural extension of my reading of the Romantic poets [Shelley: “the devotion to something afar/from the sphere of our sorrow”] and rage against the war and the affliction of capital. I joined. It seemed like what you did when you took off your helmet for the last time. Plus they needed a center fielder for the softball team.

My first week at the penitentiary I took a blow to the back of my head and was kicked in the ribs by one tense individual who didn’t make parole. I had witnessed his hearing as part of my [dis]orientation. I let go of the notion of the innocent criminal, although I held onto the notion of my own innocence. I resisted the romance of the prison, which was another kind of romance. Disoriented: I lost my East. I lost my West too.

The guards must have looked at me and thought buffoon, a young punk pretending to be a radical priest, and so, fuck him on general principles. To the inmates, to whom style in its condition of deprivation—the rolled cuff, the Converse high-tops, the collar—was everything, a survival tool, sympathetic magic, and a costume, I must have looked like someone fallen from the Platonic ideal of style into the exigencies of Shirt City. I was compliant and defiant in my costume. I wore my sport coat and tie to satisfy the warden’s edict. I died a little and was reborn in a houndstooth coat and a pocket silk. But I strutted like an NBA point guard and paraded about in the late ’60s paisley or magenta shirt/tie ensemble. The response from inmates included some pity for the hot mess that I was and some “slip me some skin” [no other contact was permitted]. The guards squinted and said, “Go ahead.”

Processed, “re-educated through labor” [Mao Zedong], intimidated, I signed a release, signed away my life in case I was held hostage [although the language was much more convoluted]. With other intakes I was photographed in a photo booth, like at a boardwalk amusement park—half banquette, half curtain, three beeps, four flashes. Instead of my terrified, thick-necked white face, a strip of four black faces dropped in the slot. Two profiles, two toothy smiles, subtitled with numbers of the last guy—mon semblable, mon frère! My first identity disorder. My first fiction.

Years go by. I mean that as a question. Storage of memory is not retrieval of memory—retrieval is part will and part unwilling neural tide. Memory of ratting my way through the corridors comes back, unbidden, like a particular smell—only a fraction of a fraction of a microparticle will set off an olfactory memory, and then I am revisiting a taste of blood from a human sacrifice at Ur. Retrieval is a time snatch, requires a deft athletic maneuver or a stumbling fall, or some of both.

It is like retrying a case, bringing the experience back into a courtroom full of sensationalizing reporters and grieving spectators, family members, ex-lovers. Everybody has a stake in the outcome. Everyone has a version of what happened and an opinion and a plea. Most of them wrong about everything. There are prosecutors and defendants, a judge and a jury selected from your high-school teachers all loud in your head and struggling to be heard. And the entire proceedings are conducted using lines of poems from Emily Dickinson. My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun. Or Before I got my eye put out.

Was I hired at the jail because I was the young collegiate altruist with some Spanish? No, I was there because I ran recklessly and with abandon as a halfback [Coach Huntress, I am your boy] and collided with other thick-necked individuals and so they thought, those administrators in Prison Education, that I could protect myself.

To get there I drove William Penn Drive, or Pen Drive, in the nomenclature of the joint. Heartbreak Ridge Road slanted off to the left. It led the back way to Big House Circle and Dairy Barn Road as if this were a parody of a suburban development. My route was down a road visible in its entirety from the tower. Guards and inmates alike could see me coming a mile away in my convertible as I performed free, white, and twenty-one.

I walked through seven hot electric locks from the fake Florentine tower where guards surveyed everything to my place in Education. “When I hear the word culture . . . I release the safety on my Browning!” says a character in the play Schlageter, by Nazi poet laureate Hanns Johst. Enter, stage left, me, as uneasy emissary of Culture.

Class, race, and gender as I knew them in their safe ratios were shattered in the cauldron of the joint. [Shattered too was Light, Space, Time.] Class: under, mixed with radical other. Race: 70 percent Black and Hispanic. Gender: all male cast, violently heterosexual, violently homosexual. A vocal brown majority replaced Nixon’s silent white majority. Inmates looked at the warden’s picture of the president on top of the business deployment flowchart with amused hatred. Class was broken down into the dream of American classlessness [everyone wearing the same Navy fatigues] and then reorganized into gangs of color, power, and gender not unlike the culture at large. Things got unzipped. Overturned, tore up, or stood on their heads.

Or stood facing the wall with an instrument, as if by some Orphic power of lung and reed and fingering the wall would fall down. The myth was if you got good enough with your horn, the wall would crumble and you would walk out into the promised land. In the same vein: the mock presidential election held inside for those who couldn’t vote yielded Alabama Governor George Wallace as the winner. Why? I asked an inmate. “Wallace win and the wall come down.” The place had its grandiloquent ways.

The prison was lit like an operating room, like a train station, the back of a high-school physics classroom, a monastery, the barracks at Fort Dix. How could it be dim and dazzling at the same time? I had no Foucault to describe the light. “Of course you know the work of Frantz Fanon?” my teacher’s aide said. Had I known Fanon I would have been able to speak of the blackness: a drop of sun under the earth.

My teacher’s aide, S, an inmate, spoke three languages and studied with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert [now Baba Ram Dass] at Harvard in the League for Spiritual Discovery. S’s advanced degree in psychology was trumped by an honorary doctorate in insouciance he earned in jail. He got busted in Texas crossing the border in his Volkswagen Beetle, a first offense for possession of pot [which sounds like the synopsis of a Janis Joplin song]. I imagined him being held upside down on a pole. “Bring that boy on in here,” he said the judge said. A light-skinned African-American from Boston; S became my mentor, my jazz rabbi, my alma mater.

S stole books for me from the prison library and stamped the edges with “Property of the Catholic Chaplain” so when my person and possessions were inspected by the guards on my way out I was guaranteed a safe passage.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead; Notes from the Underground; Kafka; Wilde; The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks by Fanon; Alan Watts; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; McLuhan; Black Elk Speaks; The Portable Nietzsche, publishers’ ove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Beautiful Throat
• Garden
• Summer Rain
• Raccoon
• Goodbye Tuscaloosa
• Ballad and Proposition
• Gaze
• What Are They Doing in the Next Room?
• The Whiteness
• Marvin Gaye Sings the National Anthem, 1983
• “Are You Ready to Smash White Things?”
• Lewisburg
• Meat
• Run
• Boilermaker
• Bird
• Sister
• Button
• Pollen
• Honey
• True/False
• Ferment
• Index