[Holly Martins]

What you say is interesting, Philip, and reinforces the views of a friend who worked for a time at a high security prison in the UK. He said the prison officers and authorities there were generally unsympathetic to the idea of prisoners' education, seeing it as an excuse for prisoners to get out of cells/work etc and barely tolerated his working with them. I agree about the level of illiteracy among prisoners in jails but this highlights my point about why little poetry of value was produced in German P.O.W camps during the war when they contained many intelligent men who - apart from tunneling operations - had endless leisure time.

[Philip Lyons]

Perhaps they were too busy digging, Holly! It's curious, though, as you say. Primo Levi wrote a few poems about Auschwitz (even if he's better known in the English-speaking world for his prose) but his incarceration was of a different order and these poems seem like some kind of personal exorcism. There may just have been a shortage of poetically-inclined British POWs; there is, after all, plenty of good Second World War poetry (Keith Douglas and Charles Causley, in particular, spring to mind).

[W.F. Lantry]

Well, there's always Etheridge Knight. I met him briefly in Boston back in the 80's. Now, there was a true poet, if ever there was one. One could recognize it almost immediately. He wasn't "trying to work on it'" he wasn't "hoping to write a few things." Remember Soyinka's phrase: "The tiger doesn't walk through the forest saying 'I'm a tiger, I'm a tiger.' The tiger roars!" That was Etheridge Knight, and may his soul rest in peace...

Thanks,

Bill

[Gregory Dowling]

Phil,
Great to see you on this pages. I hope you'll become a regular.
Another non-contemporary (and very famous) example is Lovelace, in particular this poem:
To Althea, from Prison .
And another name that comes to mind is Etheredge Knight, though I confess I know nothing of his poetry. Anybody familiar with it?
Gregory

[Janice D. Soderling]

Don't forget Nazim Hikmet. He spent nearly two-thirds of his adult life in prison and exile. Two of his books are titled From Four Prisons and In Bursa's Fortress Prison. There is one in particular that I would like to quote here, but it is way too long to type in completely and anyway I didn't find the translation I wanted. I have it in several different translations. The one I found is titled Since I Was Thrown Inside,translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk.

His Selected Poems (translated by Ruth Christie, Richard McKane & Talat Sait Halman) is published by Anvil.

I want to mention also Carolyn Forché's anthology "Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness" which has many poems on incarceration. Including some by Primo Levi as mentioned above.

[Philip Lyons]

Thanks for the welcome, Gregory. I hadn't realised the Lovelace poem was where that famous couplet comes from: "Stone walls do not a prison make,/Nor iron bars a cage." And that's synchronicity, mentioning Etheridge Knight almost at the same time as Bill! As a fan of country music I'd also want to cite Merle Haggard (who I believe was inspired to turn his life around after seeing Johnny Cash perform when he (Haggard) was an inmate at San Quentin -- where this thread began). I'm not wanting to confuse song lyrics with poetry (don't get me started on Christopher Ricks and Bob Dylan!) but songs like "Sing Me Back Home" and "Mama Tried" have their roots in Haggard's own experience of being in prison.

[Wendy Sloan]

Thanks, all.
This has been a really interesting thread.
I'd never heard of Ethereidge Knight before.

[David Nelson Bradsher]

Tyrone Green (aka Eddie Murphy) recited this one on SNL many years ago. Anybody else remember it?

Watch dog bark on a hot summer night,
kill my landlord, kill my landlord,
watch dog bark, do he bite,
kill my landlord, kill my landlord,
slip in his window, break his neck,
then his house I start to wreck,
got no reason, what the heck!
kill my landlord, kill my landlord,
C-I-L-L my landlord.