A Poet and Ex-Con Writes About Life After Prison

FELON
Poems
By Reginald Dwayne Betts

In “Felon,” his searing third collection of poems, Reginald Dwayne Betts leads his readers through the underworlds of incarceration and its aftermath, “& if prison is where Black / men go to become / Lazarus,” it is in the aftermath that the attempt to come back to life is systematically thwarted by a society that desires something like eternal retribution. “There is no name for this thing that you’ve become,” he writes: “Convict, prisoner, inmate, lifer, yardbird, all fail.” What does not fail is the language Betts sends prismatically through his experience, rendering the entire spectrum of the carceral state visible.

As a 16-year-old student who had never been in trouble, Betts hijacked a car at gunpoint, confessed to the crime, was “certified” an adult despite his age, and sentenced to nine years in prison, serving eight years and three months. He spent 14 months in solitary confinement for various infractions against spoken and unspoken rules (such as cursing and touching a guard’s arm). One day someone slipped an anthology of poetry under his cell door: “The Black Poets,” edited by Dudley Randall, Detroit’s first poet laureate. Betts had already been writing, but now began a serious apprenticeship, copying the anthologized poems by hand, breathing the lyric art of Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay into the sunless, malodorous cellblocks of his confinement. In a moment of premonitory recognition, Betts took as his prison name “Shahid,” the Arabic word for “witness.”

After his release he would attend college and earn a graduate degree in poetry writing, followed by a doctorate in jurisprudence from Yale Law School. He would publish a compelling memoir about his crime and incarceration, and two poetry books preceding this one, both critically acclaimed. It is an improbable trajectory, and no one knows this better than Betts, who deserves now to be recognized more for the brilliance of his lyric art than the vicissitudes of his fate as a youth.

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[ Read Reginald Dwayne Betts’s essay about his path from prison to law school ]

“Felon” opens with a masterful ghazal — a form he learned from another Shahid, the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali. The poem, with its refrain “after prison,” signals that the subject of this book is not the classification of the crime committed, but rather its indelible scar, a mark carried beyond served time into the future lives of former convicts, preventing them from acquiring gainful employment, from voting, seeking admission to college or receiving such basic federal benefits as food stamps. “Name a song,” the poem opens, “that tells a man what to expect after prison.” In independent but thematically linked couplets, the poet walks the reader through prison’s aftermath, holding Virgil’s lamp to the various circles of carceral hell.