The rich history of prison literature was brought to my attention at the end of an essay written in the 1960's by Kenneth Rexroth. By great timing, I had just toured Alcatraz with an Idaho sheriff who gave me the inside dirt on the rock's history and how jail works for the keepers. Rexroth, in his elegiac complaint noted that a great many books came from prisoners and were written about prison, but there wasn't a prison lit anthology. Rexroth thought it should be treated and taught as a genre. In the 60's alone, we have Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Soledad Brother by George Jackson. Most of the axis that Malcolm X's Autobiography hinges upon is his stint in jail. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thoreau wrote from behind bars. The Marquis de Sade hid his 120 Days of Sodom in the brass bed frame of his Bastille confinement. Anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote about slave labor conditions, corporate interest and profit from prison, burned bits of food being substituted for coffee grounds and the inhumane practice of solitary confinement in his late 19th century memoirs. Rexroth would be glad to know that today there are many anthologies from which dear readers can get their fill. The play Coyote on a Fence is part of that long tradition. Here's my review of Post5's production.
Fabulous photograph taken by Life's photographer Nat Farbman. Kenneth Rexroth performs work from New Directions issue 15 at a poetry and jazz event in S.F., 1957. [Courtesy: the "Ordinary Finds" blog.]
