Reginald Dwayne Betts: Chants of Indictment — The David M. Katz Poetry Blog

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(This essay also appears in the current issue of the American Book Review. Links and a few slight changes have been added here.)

The fourth line of “Ghazal,” the opening poem in Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts’s powerful yet nuanced 2019 volume, contains an ars poetica in miniature for the book: “redaction is a dialect after prison.”

In the four “redaction poems,” which represent a major advance for both the poet himself and for the use of public documents in contemporary American poetry overall, Betts crosses out lengthy chunks of legal filings with thick black lines—lines, it has been said, that appropriately resemble prison bars.

Along with the visual impact of the redactions, the remaining words and phrases deliver a rhythmically charged case against the criminal justice system for the onerous bail it often demands from poor people. Unlike the redactions in the Mueller report of 2019, for example, Betts’s redactions don’t use his omissions to hide telling facts. Instead, they seek to reveal “the tragedy, drama, and injustice of a system that makes people simply a reflection of their bank accounts,” he writes in an explanatory note.

Carving these poems out of legal documents filed by the Civil Rights Corps, a criminal-justice advocacy group, Betts follows in the tradition of Testimony (1965) and Holocaust (1975), Charles Reznikoff’s sweeping poetic investigations of the dark side of twentieth-century history. Although the work of both poets reveals injustice, their approaches to the use of documents differ sharply. Working from nineteenth-century legal cases and records of the Nuremberg trials, Reznikoff strips out the turgid rhetoric to yield a spare, Objectivist poetry that lays bare social ills without commenting on them. For his part, Betts excerpts and reshapes the legal phrases, turning them into chants of indictment against what he observes to be injustices of the prison system.

While these poems don’t refer to Betts’s own experience, their impetus is clearly personal. In 1996, at the age of sixteen, Betts, a high school honors student, took the fatal step that continues to resound through all his writings. In a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, he tapped the window of a car with a pistol, awakening the sleeping driver and, along with a fifteen-year-old friend, stole the vehicle.

Tried as an adult—as was often the case in those years, when black juveniles tended to be regarded as “super predators” by prosecutors—he ended up serving eight years and four months in various prisons, including two six-month-long stretches in solitary. While in prison, Betts intensively read and wrote poetry and began studying law from books available to him. Incredibly, he was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 2017, two decades after serving his last day in prison.

Much of his experience behind bars through the age of twenty-four is recounted in his trenchant 2009 memoir, A Question of Freedom, while Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015), a previous volume of verse, riffs on the historical roots of the increase in crimes like his and of the rise in mass imprisonment. How that experience and history will play out after prison is the territory Felon explores.

In the masterly “Ghazal,” Betts supplies a map for navigating what will follow. “Name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison,” he writes, adding, “you’re still a suspect after prison.” The “song” named is the ode-like form of the ghazal itself. Typically expressive of longing, ghazals proceed in self-contained couplets that can sometimes be considered poems in themselves. Like prisoners in adjoining cells, Betts’s couplets call out to each other in a “dialect” they share that’s suggested by the word “prison,” the word he has chosen to end every other line. Fittingly, the form replicates the speaker’s endlessly returning obsession with all that the word means to him.

By the final, richly allusive couplet, however, he discovers and invokes the means of his liberation: “You have come so far, Beloved, & for what, another song?/Then sing. Shahid you’re loved, not shipwrecked, after prison.” Like the Arabic and Persian poets who originated the form, Betts addresses a Beloved and, with a sly allusion, fulfills the convention of mentioning the name of the poet in the last line. While in prison, in an act of self-definition perhaps foretelling the kind of poet he would become, he assumed the name “Shahid,” a word from the Koran that means “witness.” Tenderly encouraging his beloved earlier self to fully embrace song, the speaker discovers poetry as his means of redemption after prison.

In this volume, however, Betts also comes to grips with his sense that while his life has thoroughly changed, he remains a “suspect” to himself. In Blake’s phrase, Betts’s manacles have become “mind-forg’d.” Thus, while the habit of brooding self-reflection he appears to have developed in prison provides a solid basis for the personal lyrics that form the bulk of the book, it can no longer fully sustain his poetry. In writing the redaction poems, he seems to have accepted that he cannot shed the shadowy suspicion that, on some level, he remains a felon. Severing his connection with personal experience, he turns his focus to describing the lives of others and advocating for them.

At the same time, Betts retains his strong commitment to poetic art even when his poems are at their most political. “There is a particular kind of vision needed to know that art can be influential and lead to change without being didactic,” he says of the redaction poems. In “In Alabama,” he unearths a pounding rhythm, thick with alliteration, from a lawsuit for excessive use of bail filed against the City of Montgomery. “IN THE … / … MIDDLE … OF ALABAMA,” the poem begins, ominously echoing Dante. (Ellipses indicate redactions.) Plunging the reader into the situation in medias res, the text begins:

The plaintiffs … … impoverished … jailed
by the
City … unable to pay …
traffic tickets … pay …
… or sit … in … jail … $50 per day

Weaving among the poet’s black marks, the repeating rhymes of “pay” and “day” move down the page. The repetitions temporarily halt to reveal the privations of poor prisoners “cleaning the … City … scrubbing/feces and blood from jail floors….” So precise is the poet-editor’s hand that he’s able to isolate street dialect as he inveighs against Montgomery’s practice of “jailing people if they … poor….”

Similarly, “In Missouri” is a cry from hell. Betts has chosen his text well here by using a lawsuit against a city with its own chilling resonance: Ferguson. More potently than investigative reporting, the poem takes the reader on what it calls “a Kafkaesque journey” through overcrowded cells where toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap are denied, illnesses and open wounds are left untreated, and “filthy bodies huddle in cold.” With exemplary delicacy, Betts observes that the latter inmates are protected by “a single thin/blanket.”

While the redaction poems—the other two are “In Houston” and “In California”—represent the apex of the book, Felon’s many fine lyric poems offer emotionally persuasive cases for change. Displaying his formidable descriptive powers in the cinematic “A Man Drops a Coat on the Sidewalk and Almost Falls into the Arms of Another,” Betts portrays, in the poetic equivalent of slow motion, a danse macabre involving two men high on heroin struggling together to maintain their balance. Although the poem’s speaker, who is photographing the scene, is at a distance from the junkies, the language of the poem zooms into the scene in its extraordinary closing lines: “it’s a wonder/how something that can have you hold another so/gently could be the ruin of all you might touch.”

In “Ballad of the Groundhog,” the sad fate of an animal attempting to scale the razor wire atop a prison fence may trigger outrage at conditions “in this country where states still turn/men into numbers.” In a dazzling phrase, Betts ruefully notes that we are all “shanked/on a spiraling cosmos.” The comparison with the groundhog, in turn, individualizes the prisoners. Any human, like any animal, the poet is saying, aspires to be free.

Photo Credit: "Felon: Poems" by New America is licensed under CC BY 2.0.