Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror (review)

Intersections between scholarship and artistry receive scant attention except in casual observations of their antithesis. The sterile, esoteric prose and limited circulation of academic journals limit their appeal to people—such as undergraduate college students—eager to translate abstract ideas into social action. Occasionally scholars do recognize the stakes of bridging the creative chasm between academics and artists. An entire issue of the American Communication Journal (6.1, 2002) was devoted to this topic. At stake is more than the accessibility of academic prose; it is the challenge of communicating intellectual insights of social theorists in ways that catalyze changes in praxis. Stephen John Hartnett clearly understands that the engaged scholar must justify social stances rationally but also instigate action by arousing emotion.

The author approaches the plight of incarceration ethnographically. Having taught courses in prison systems since 1990, Hartnett crafts "a political poetry of witness" (4) that combines narration of direct observations with commentary on the failures of so-called "criminal justice" in America. He declares kinship with Walt Whitman, who retained faith in the American democratic experiment despite its systemic failures. While Whitman sings the body electric, Hartnett laments the man electrocuted. Poetic residues of Whitman's ecstatic ejaculations, virtual verbal orgasms whose lines overflow page margins, appear nowhere in this collection. The prison poems are as constricted as the prison environment. Stanzas usually of three sparse lines give readers biographical fragments or statistical snippets that wander through the maze of high-tech surveillance, searches, and lockdowns. Hartnett is no Virgil offering a guided tour through the hell of incarceration. Instead, the prison poems have the feel of waypoints without destinations, pausing to observe but not to understand the bizarre history of San Quentin and the souvenirs in the gift shop at Alcatraz, to hear brainwashed and mind-numbed guards ridicule anti-death-penalty activists in the essay "Love and Death in California," and to witness the irrationality of profiteering from punishment.

The originality of Hartnett's creative project suffers from physical constraints of the format. Admitting that the poems "actively refuse to fit into traditional genres of textual production" (2), readers experience the poems in exactly that traditional genre. Aside from using italics to indicate a change of voice, the poems themselves break no new stylistic ground. The research is segregated from the poems in endnotes (22 pages worth), so the constant shift from text to notes poses a problem: read the poetry and the endnotes separately to preserve their continuity, or constantly shift back and forth from poems to notes? This physical segregation reinforces divisions between poetry and pedagogy. Readers may well question whether the medium itself must evolve to accommodate a project that blends genres whose very presentational modes—the linear argumentation of scholarship and the molding of poetic form to the subject—differ so drastically.

As for the poems themselves, Hartnett skillfully interweaves his voice as activist with snippets of scholarship and selections written by prisoners [End page 368] themselves. The very skill of this seamless integration exacts a price. Individual prisoners never seem to speak for themselves. Contrary to creative works about the Holocaust that revivify the lost voices, the investigative prison poems never let readers forget they are looking in from the outside. At best, individual prisoners might come into focus as a nickname, a vignette, or a secondhand story that foregrounds their identity. But they quickly fade into the anonymous mass of the condemned, the contained, the forgotten. Although the collection is labeled "Prison Poems of Hope and Terror," readers find little of either. Terror here is less the abject horror of specific gruesome, dramatic spectacles than the pathetic erosion of the soul, the layers of humanity sloughed from the person by the degradation of the...