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    Working in The Dark

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    aekulak
    The poet reflects on how writing poetry helped him through his imprisonment. Through writing about the weeds outside his cell window, he was able to transport himself outside of himself and feel free. Writing bridged his life as a prisoner and as a free man, allowing him to express the emotional trauma of prison but also find empathy and compassion. He wrote to sublimate his rage over the injustices he faced and to affirm his love of life.

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    Working in The Dark

    Uploaded by

    aekulak
    189 views2 pages
    The poet reflects on how writing poetry helped him through his imprisonment. Through writing about the weeds outside his cell window, he was able to transport himself outside of himself and feel free. Writing bridged his life as a prisoner and as a free man, allowing him to express the emotional trauma of prison but also find empathy and compassion. He wrote to sublimate his rage over the injustices he faced and to affirm his love of life.

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    Working in the Dark

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    The poet reflects on how writing poetry helped him through his imprisonment. Through writing about the weeds outside his cell window, he was able to transport himself outside of himself and feel free. Writing bridged his life as a prisoner and as a free man, allowing him to express the emotional trauma of prison but also find empathy and compassion. He wrote to sublimate his rage over the injustices he faced and to affirm his love of life.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    189 views2 pages

    Working in The Dark

    Uploaded by

    aekulak
    The poet reflects on how writing poetry helped him through his imprisonment. Through writing about the weeds outside his cell window, he was able to transport himself outside of himself and feel free. Writing bridged his life as a prisoner and as a free man, allowing him to express the emotional trauma of prison but also find empathy and compassion. He wrote to sublimate his rage over the injustices he faced and to affirm his love of life.

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    “Working in the Dark”

    Jimmy Santiago Baca


    Reflections of a Poet in the Barrio

    I was born a poet one noon, gazing at weeds and creosoted


    grass at the base of a telephone pole outside my grilled cell
    window. The words I wrote then sailed me out of myself, and I
    was transported and metamorphosed into the images they
    made. From the dirty brown blades of grass came bolts of
    electrical light that jolted loose my old self; through the top of
    my head that self was released and reshaped in the clump of
    scrawny grass. Through language I became the grass, speaking
    its language and feeling its green feelings and black root
    sensations. Earth was my mother and I bathed in sunshine.
    Minuscule speckles of sunlight passed through my green skin
    and metabolized in my blood.

    Writing bridged my divided life of prisoner and free man. I wrote


    of the emotional butchery of prisons, and of my acute gratitude
    for poetry. Where my blind doubt and spontaneous trust in life
    met, I discovered empathy and compassion. The power to
    express myself was a welcome storm rasping at tendril roots,
    flooding my soul’s cracked dirt. Writing was water that
    cleansed the wound and fed the parched root of my heart.

    I wrote to sublimate my rage, from a place where all hope is


    gone, from a madness of having been damaged too much, from
    a silence of killing rage. I wrote to avenge the betrayals of a
    lifetime, to purge the bitterness of injustice. I wrote with a deep
    groan of doom in my blood, bewildered and dumbstruck; from
    an indestructible love of life, to affirm breath and laughter and
    the abiding innocence of things. I wrote the way I wept, and
    danced and made love.

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