“Prison Ecopoetics: Concrete, Imagined, and Textual Spaces in American Inmate Poetry.”

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rgrl20

Download by: [Sarah Nolan] Date: 16 August 2016, At: 07:59

Green Letters

ISSN: 1468-8417 (Print) 2168-1414 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgrl20

Prison ecopoetics: concrete, imagined, and textualspaces in American inmate poetry

Sarah Nolan

To cite this article: Sarah Nolan (2014) Prison ecopoetics: concrete, imagined,and textual spaces in American inmate poetry, Green Letters, 18:3, 312-324, DOI:10.1080/14688417.2014.922894

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.922894

Published online: 08 Oct 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 20

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Prison ecopoetics: concrete, imagined, and textual spaces in Americaninmate poetry

Sarah Nolan*

English Department, University of Nevada, Reno, USA

(Received 11 October 2013; accepted 7 May 2014)

Bell Gale Chevigny writes, in prison ‘[n]ature is the more valued for its scarcity’, yet verylittle work has been done on the ways inmates engage with environments. Continuallyconfronted by a lack of multidimensional environmental experiences, the prisoner is moreaware and more conscious of the complex and often invisible ways in which environmentsmanifest themselves. As such, I contend that there is an ecopoetics of prison poetry thatresults from the inmate’s hyper-awareness of environmental encounter and the variousforms in which that can arrive. By acknowledging and embracing this new forum forecopoetic studies, we not only become more conscious of the ways in which Americaninmates respond and express their confinement but also uncover the disconnectionsbetween traditional ideas of nature and ecopoetics. This article will consider a variety ofanthologised prison poets and the ways in which they engage with ecopoetics.

Keywords: ecopoetics; American poetry; prison poetry; poetry; poetics

on warm summer eveningsi hear the tumbaoof your sky blue congadeclamandocarrying your inspirationover the walllike a refreshingcaribbean wind

if it weren’t forthe culturally deprived mindsin the gun towersi’d sweari was in central parkchilling outby the fountain (95)

-Raymond Ringo Fernandez1

In ‘ “Opening a Vein”: Inmate Poetry and The Prison Experience’, Johnson and Chernoff(2002) explain that in prison the ‘bare living compartment is of a piece with the larger prisonsetting, which is normally a monolithic construction of concrete and steel, bordered byformidable barriers – stone walls, electrified fences, bales of concertina wire – that arepunctuated by imposing guard towers placed strategically at the corners and angles of theinstitution’s perimeter’ (142). A place defined by its highly regulated atmosphere and entirelyman-made environs is an unlikely space for ecopoetic critique. Yet, when read through this

*Email: [email protected]

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2014Vol. 18, No. 3, 312–324, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.922894

© 2014 ASLE-UKI

lens, the poetry of those confined to this space reveals unique interactions with the environ-ment. Raymond Ringo Fernandez’s ‘poem for the conguero in D-yard’ illustrates, through thewriting of an inmate deprived of natural environmental experiences, how deeply engrainedenvironments are in human consciousness. Despite the inmate’s deprivation from nature andhis removal from cultural spaces and practices that shape his home environment, he is easilytransported to those places within the mind while still embracing the experience at hand. Forthe speaker, the music of the ‘sky blue’ drum is perceptible only ‘on warm summer evenings’and through it, the inmate can almost transcend the prison walls and imagine himself in‘Central Park’. Entranced by the rhythm of the drum, the sound pushes him into his ownmemories of place as it brushes over him ‘like a refreshing/caribbean wind’. Yet, as thespeaker reminds us, all of this is framed by the guards ‘in the gun towers’ who demand hisacknowledgement of his current place and time.

Even in the highly unnatural space of the prison, environments remain present andvital. Whether those are the immediate environments of concrete and metal, the remem-bered places of past lives or the glimpses of the outside world viewed through and overprison walls, environments are, in fact, the primary element of a prisoner’s life.Confronted by a lack of multidimensional environmental experiences, the prisoner ismore aware and more conscious of the complex and often invisible ways in whichenvironments manifest themselves. While the prison poetry considered here is not eco-poetry in its intentionally environmentalist sense, when read through the lens of ecopoe-tics2 – a critical mode of reading that considers how environmental experience, includingphysical elements as well as the subjective peripheral data that bombards the perceiver, isrepresented in text – it is clear that there is an ecopoetics of the prison poetry genre thatresults from the inmate’s hyper-awareness of environmental encounter and the variousoften unexpected and non-traditional forms in which that can arrive. Put another way,prison ecopoetics is an acknowledgement of how our understanding of the genre of prisonpoetry is enhanced and clarified by the reading practice of ecopoetics. By acknowledgingand embracing this new forum for ecopoetic studies, we not only become more consciousof the ways in which American inmates respond to and express their confinement but alsouncover the disconnections between traditional ideas of nature and ecopoetics. In otherwords, this reading of prison ecopoetics demonstrates that wide varieties of environmentsmake their way into poetry, and those influences need not be natural, pleasant, unmediatedor even immediately present in order to be read through this lens.

Poetry written by inmates is not, however, the only writing that is added to discussionsof ecopoetics by reconsidering what counts as environmental for ecopoetic critique. Theshift away from the term ‘nature’ and towards the alternative term ‘environment’ is abroadening gesture as the latter word is purposely inclusive not only of all physical spacesbut also of disparity in how individuals experience those places. By shifting from theconcept of nature to the idea of environment, then, ecopoetics is capable of analysing textsfrom more diverse and unlikely backgrounds. Prisoners are among a larger group ofoutsiders who were until quite recently marginalised in discussions of both ecopoetics andecocriticism in general. Over 10 years ago, in ‘ “Nature” and Environmental Justice’, MeiMei Evans (2002) observed that

strategic deployments of representations of Nature of the ‘wild’ have been ‘naturalizing’ andthus privileging straight white men in U.S. society since ‘discovery.’ According to thisepistemological paradigm, those who have been socially constructed as Other (i.e., notwhite and/or not straight and/or not male) are viewed as intruders or otherwise out of placewhen they venture into or attempt to inhabit Nature. (183)

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 313

Evans’s observations that culture dictates what is considered nature or what constitutes anenvironmental experience problematises the dominant and ongoing focus in much eco-poetic theory on such experiences. In doing so, ecopoetics ignores the experiences of whatEvans calls the ‘Other’ by refusing to acknowledge their environments – whether thoseenvironments are wild or built, natural or constructed and internal or external. To someextent, this movement in ecopoetics and ecocriticism has now taken place, but not all‘Others’ have been accepted or studied. By acknowledging new types of environments,ecopoetics becomes capable of looking at poems that do not have an overt focus on natureor even the physical environment, but instead reveal an individual’s subjective experiencein any space in language. Reading prison ecopoetics illustrates, then, that while ecopoetryis a genre primarily focused on expressing environmentalist concerns, the reading practiceof ecopoetics that is employed throughout this article is interested in locating environ-mental influence in poems where such observations might otherwise go unnoticed andunconsidered because of its unnatural facade.

Realising that wild nature is not its only source, ecopoetic studies have shifted towardsanalysing new types of poetic spaces and experiences. Even as early as Imagining theEarth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Elder 1985), a foundational text of ecopoetics,John Elder gestures towards the movement of ecopoetry into unexpected environmentswhen he argues that ‘to turn from the cities ignores the fact that they rise from the sameearth and are composed of the same elements as the unpeopled mountains’ (25). Despitethis call for ecopoetry to be inclusive of all environments, it has thus far been largelyapplied to poems that are overtly – either entirely or in part – about environmentsconsidered ‘natural’. However, current ecopoetic ideas think more broadly: in recentissues of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, articles onecopoetics focus not only on Marianne Moore and Mary Oliver, fairly canonical ecopoeticfigures, but also on poets like E.E. Cummings who has received little attention as anecopoet.3 As the focus of ecopoetic studies begins to move towards poets who are notovertly discussing natural environments, the field is opened up to a wide variety of writerswho are either unable or uninterested in engaging with traditional ideas of nature. Theexpansion of the field grows from developments in ecocriticism more generally.Specifically relating to poetry, for example, in Ecology Without Nature: RethinkingEnvironmental Aesthetics, Timothy Morton (2007) argues that ‘nature keeps givingwriters the slip. And in all its confusing, ideological intensity, nature ironically impedesa proper relationship with the earth and its life-forms, which would, of course, includeethics and science’ and proposes a new theory that he terms ‘ambient poetics’ throughwhich the textuality of the piece and context of the reader gain agency (Morton 2007, 2).Morton’s proposed ‘ambient poetics’ is not entirely dissimilar from the ecopoetic reading Ibring to prison poetry but while his work is primarily interested in the context of thereader, mine is concerned with the context of the writer – specifically, those aspects of thepoet’s context that are infused into the text but typically get overlooked or dismissed asmental but not environmental.

Broadening the scope of ecopoetics in this way is certainly not without its risks. Inremoving the requirement that ecopoetics engage with the natural world, the field runs therisk of becoming undefined and amorphous, encapsulating all poems and, for that matter,all writing. I argue, though, that, while it is true that any poem might be read eco-poetically, the poems discussed here justify attention because of their ambient quality:they show, all too vividly, how environments environ the writer. Moreover, the risk ofecopoetics overstepping its boundaries is mitigated by the threat inherent in ignoring theenvironmentality of poems that do not engage overtly with natural space. By imposing

314 S. Nolan

such restrictions on poetry, as critics like Evans have argued, ecopoetics is isolated fromlarge portions of the population that are unable or unwilling to participate in traditionalnature.

In ecopoetic theory, the movement towards addressing unnatural environments iscertainly not unprecedented. In his journal Ecopoetics, Jonathan Skinner has long positedthe unnatural elements of ecopoetics. In his editor’s statement to the first issue of thejournal, he writes, ‘As our perception of the natural world continues to be refined (orforgotten), it seems that contemporary poetry’s complexities might actually be useful forextending and developing that perception’ (Skinner 2001, 5). Considering how contem-porary poetry aligns with ecopoetic movements towards radical experimentation withlanguage and form as well as engagement with built spaces, Skinner’s journal sparked adiscussion of how poetic elements relate to environments. Similarly, in her 2010 article,Marcella Durand specifically points towards unnatural spaces and calls for ecopoeticattention to these atypical environments, encouraging a broadened understanding of thetypes of environments available for eco-critique (118). Although these ideas compelscholars of ecopoetic theory to consider new environments, they do not adequatelyexplore the boundaries of those claims, if there are any, or the ways in which ecopoetsattempt to express such sentiments. In Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, The Natureof Language, Scott Knickerbocker (2012) begins such a move when he observes that‘[eco]poems undo simple oppositions between humans and nature … Rather than attemptto erase the artifice of their own poems (to make them seem more natural and supposedly,then, closer to nature), … [ecopoets] unapologetically embrace artifice – not for its ownsake, but as a way to relate meaningfully to the natural world. Indeed for them, artifice isnatural’ (emphasis in original; 2). Highlighting the importance of an acknowledgeddisconnection between the human and the non-human, Knickerbocker’s argument rightlyposits that ecopoetics engages its own artifice. My intervention in this essay is to test thelimits of this new trend in ecopoetic critique. As we begin to consider unnatural environ-ments as sites for ecopoetry, we must consider how and why individuals engage withenvironments as they do and, perhaps more importantly, what environments or aspects ofthem evoke specifically ecopoetic engagement.

In terms of prison ecopoetics, the ways in which inmates engage with their environ-ments have received little critical attention. The genre of prison poetry in general hasreceived some treatment in literary scholarship, appearing in a variety of collections butwith little consistency in methodology or findings. The two most prominent anthologies4

that represent the collected work of prison poetry are Joseph Bruchac’s The Light fromAnother Country: Poetry From American Prisons (1984) and Julie Zimmerman’s TrappedUnder Ice: A Death Row Anthology (1995). Aside from these, inmates and former inmatespublish books of poetry independently, few of which garner much attention in mainstreamliterary journals and even less so in ecocritical forums. Work on prison poetics andwriting, by comparison, ranges widely. The most prominent examples of prison scholar-ship are Daniel Quentin Miller’s edited collection titled Prose and Cons: Essays on PrisonLiterature in the United States (2005), Howard Bruce Franklin’s Prison Writing in 20th-

Century America (1998) and Ioan Davies’s Writers in Prison (1990). These texts considerhow the prison experience shapes and is shaped by writing. Yet, they do not engagespecifically with poetry or with the ways inmates engage with environments during theirincarceration.

Ken Lamberton’s Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist’s Observations From Prison(2000), however, draws important connections between prison and environment as his proserecords perspectives on nature from within prison walls. Lamberton’s poetic prose might be

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 315

read as a somewhat conventional example of prison ecopoetics as it acknowledges theimportant role of the natural world even within the highly mediated space of his imprison-ment. In his book, Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years As A Prison Volunteer, Richard Shelton(2007), a prison volunteer who worked with many inmates including Lamberton, details therealities of the prison environment and the various natural, social and personal elements thatshape it, demonstrating the complex range of emotions and responses to incarceration. Similarto realisations like Shelton’s that prison is never wholly the dead, emotionless space intendedby the authorities, Johnson and Chernoff argue that ‘[p]rison is a setting of punishment, aninstitution of confinement and work, but for inmates, prison is also their home. These poemsreveal the thoughtful, almost tender regard some prisoners feel for their environment: for theprison yard at sunset, for the “small freedom” granted by outdoor work, for the liberatingeffect of sunlight’ (2002, 148). In spite of their restricted exposure to the natural environment,then, prisoners still feel tied to their largely unnatural surroundings and express those ties inunique ways. Considering ecocriticism’s extension of environments to unnatural spaces, suchas the city, and its interest in spaces that are not typically identified as environments, such asthe human body, a poetics so utterly trapped within constructed and regulated space surelydemands attention.5

In order to read the genre of prison poetry through the lens of ecopoetics, I would liketo work through three central characteristics through which much prison poetry engageswith environments: first, it describes the mental space of memory, which is often sparkedby glimpses of physical nature from within the confines of the unnatural prison environ-ment; second, it reflects meta-poetically on the limited capabilities of language in expres-sing the prison experience; third, it foregrounds the immediate physical space of theprison as a frame for all experience, thus reaffirming the mediated nature of all encountersfor the inmate. These are only a few examples of central traits of much prison poetry, andthis list is certainly neither exhaustive nor representative of all prison poetry. With such adiverse group of writers with divergent interests, backgrounds, styles and motivations, it isimpossible to encapsulate prison poetry, but these characteristics are present in a widevariety of texts and helpfully illustrate the ways in which various environments persisteven during incarceration. For present purposes, I will draw a few examples from avariety of anthologised prison poets in order to illustrate the diverse ways that thesecharacteristics emerge.

The first characteristic of prison ecopoetics is its expression of mental space inresponse to natural images. The deployment of memories triggered by the natural worldis apparent in a poem by Fernandez, a Puerto Rican raised in Brooklyn who served time atAttica. ‘poem for the conguero in D-yard’ responds to the physical environment byreclaiming a mental space filled with memories. Prompted by ‘warm summer evenings’,the speaker not only recalls but also enters a cognitive space composed of the cultural andenvironmental roots of Puerto Rico and is then transported into the memory of his NewYork life. In this space, the speaker listens to the ‘tumbao’ or rhythm of the ‘conga’flowing ‘over the wall’ of his imprisonment. He is unable to escape the ‘wall’ even in hismental space, but the visceral presence of ‘a refreshing/caribbean wind’, situates thereader within the memory of Puerto Rico.

In the following stanza, the mental space is disrupted by the physical present – theguards in ‘the gun towers’. Their presence prevents the speaker from fully transcendingthe physical space (‘if it weren’t for’) and emphasises the poet’s lived environment but itdoes not prevent the speaker from pursuing his escape into memory. Even after admittingthe physical present, the speaker meanders into a memory of New York in which he is in‘Central Park/chilling out/by the fountain’. The placement of the speaker in Central Park

316 S. Nolan

transports the poem back to a memory, which intensifies as the speaker slips into anEnglish/Spanish hybrid language:

con un yerbo and a coldcan of budorhacienda coroat un bembéon a 110th street (Fernandez 1982, 54)

Provisionally liberated from prison, this secondmemory evokes a linguistic as well as a spatialshift. Now positioned in New York, the speaker reverts to his native language, signalling adeeper entrenchment in the memory of home. As the present moment fades into the back-ground of the mental space, he must no longer write solely in the language of the prison butcan relive a specific moment of singing at a party (‘hacienda coro/at un bembe’). In ‘Toward aPrison Poetics’, Doran Larson helps explain the poem’s shift as he observes that prison poetrycontains two main tropes, which turn the voice of the poet into a representative voice for thecommunity and name the communities with which the prisoner associates (2010, 145). Inemploying his native language, integrating musical slang and engaging with New Yorkgeography, the speaker in Fernandez’s piece is able to momentarily remove himself fromthe space of his incarceration through engagement with larger communities. In so doing, thespeaker is able ‘to dismantle the isolating power of the prison, in an effort that is at oncepersonal and political: to recover agency through a willed, virtual relocation of the prisonwriter himself’ (145). The movement of the speaker into mental space, then, is not only an actof escape but also one of resistance. Although always remaining in the physical space of theprison yard, the simple trigger of a warm breeze can evoke movement into the mental space ofmemory, in which real outside places become present and tangible to the inmate. Theecopoetics of the poem, then, lies in the reading of the escape as wholly environmental;while he transports himself from the present lived space of the prison, he moves into a newimagined and remembered environment. Even within the mental space he inhabits, though,the speaker expresses sentiments of liberation. An ecopoetic reading of the poem allows thespeaker’s momentary escape through the fluctuation between his present space and his out-of-body experience to come home to the reader.

The resistance facilitated by mental space or memory is represented as essential inGeorge Mosby’s poem, ‘Variations on a Late October Day’. While the poem’s title impliesa romantic contemplation of place, its subtitle, ‘prison poem’, contradicts such notions.Surprisingly, the poem is not what one might expect from a ‘prison poem’ but largely tiedto idyllic images of nature. It concludes:

3) and acorns falland thump the earthlike irregular fingersthumping a bald man’s head4) and the grass goes yellowon a hillwhere summer cows grazedon sun-impregnated green5) and frost replaces the dew in dawn –and reflections of the autumn-lit streamin the woods behind my grandma’s housecontrol the rhythms of my soul (Mosby 1984, 236)6

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 317

Images of ‘acorns’, grassy hills, grazing ‘cows’ and an ‘autumn-lit stream’ are unexpectedelements of a prison poem. Starkly contrasting with other representations of the yard,Mosby’s poem appears to be unlike his everyday experience of an ‘October Day’.Although the speaker foregrounds the poem’s physical space – the prison yard – heproceeds into the mental space. In fact, the natural imagery of the poem reiterates theresistance tropes that Larson identifies, as the speaker intentionally and overtly ignores thereality of his physical space in favour of a mental environment. However, the speakerexplains in the fifth section that these images are ‘in the woods behind [his] grandma’shouse’, invoking a new mental space composed of memory. The speaker did not simplyimagine an idyllic October day, but instead recalled the experience of one. Prompted bynothing more than an October day in prison, he engages so fully with the mental spacethat without the poem’s subtitle, readers would be unaware of the physical environment inwhich it was composed. Yet, the subtitle, ‘prison poem’, moves reality insistently to thefore, demanding that the reader acknowledge the space of the poem’s creation and thespeaker’s ability to mentally move beyond the walls of his incarceration.

Despite the poem’s clear depiction of a natural environment, its fullest engagement withan ecopoetic reading emerges in the final line. For the speaker, the natural scene that he recallsfrom the woods is central to his everyday survival. It is those memories that ‘control therhythms of [his] soul’. In Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing, Bell Chevigny (1999)observes that ‘[d]oing time is also doing space, for the temporal distortion is paralleled bytyrannical control of space’ (2011, ‘25’). In this sense, the restrictions placed on an inmate’sspace are an intentional facet of their punishment. Faced with the harsh physical space of theprison, the speaker turns towards memories of natural space and redeploys them as an escapeinto a new environment. Capable of expressing this mental space as vividly as a lived one,‘Variations on a Late October Day’ reveals the sustained power that spaces hold and thatphysical environments, while present and important, are not the only influence on how onesees and experiences the world. Prison poetry is well poised to illustrate the multifacetedspaces that compose experience because it is rooted in a space largely devoid of variation. Byrevealing how inmates can enter mental space, these poets reveal the ways seeminglyunnatural spaces are often linked to alternative (including remembered, imagined, textualisedor even digitised) encounters with physical environments. Prison poetry, read ecopoetically,reveals how the multiple elements that constitute an experience in a space are often conveyedtogether on the page.

Communicating the various spaces that compose prison experiences in poetry iscomplex, an observation which gestures towards the second characteristic of prisonecopoetics – the use of textual space where meta-poetic commentary questions the abilityof language to adequately express the multidimensional experience of incarceration. J.Charles Green’s ‘Isolation Cell Poem’ reads:

in herethe gods have lost all their wordsand i am incapableof creating new soundsto keep myself company

i breathe in deeplythe closeness of my bodywhile the airlike dead skinbreathes blood into the darkness (Green 1975, 21)7

318 S. Nolan

The poem creates a textual space by foregrounding its own medium. Language is movedto the fore in this piece through commentary on ‘words’ and ‘sounds’ that the speakercannot seem to find. When he writes, ‘the gods have lost all their words’, he implies thatthe guards, figures of authority and control, have gone silent, but the speaker, too,becomes ‘incapable’ of speech. Language is unable to express the isolation of the cell.By underscoring this limitation, the poem not only allows but forces the reader toacknowledge the space of the poem on the page. Beginning with the preposition ‘in’,the poem’s opening line establishes the location as within the ‘cell’ of the title and also asa place that is enclosed, restricted and inside. By using ‘here’ instead of naming the place,though, the line takes on a second meaning; the poem is pointing both towards theexperiences ‘in’ the cell and ‘in’ the poem. Since the following line reveals the poem’smeta-poetic interest, the ambiguity of the opening line takes on a new significance.

It is within this enclosed space of the poem’s text that the speaker is able to ‘breathedeeply’ and experience ‘the closeness’ of his own ‘body’. This, too, serves a dual purpose.Materially, the acknowledgement and engagement of the speaker with his own bodyunderscores the role of the body as a valid site or environment. Read ecopoetically, thepoem engages with the body as an environment into which the inmate can retreat whendeprived of a stimulating physical space. Textually, the movement into the poem impliesthat since the prisoner is incapable of ‘creating new sounds’ or engaging with ‘words’, heinstead retreats within, thus abandoning language as a method of expression. It is thephysical environment in which language should flourish, the space outside the body or‘the air’ that remains hostile and ‘dead’. The dual meanings implied by the opening lineemphasise how the prisoner’s extreme isolation causes a disjunction in language, a toolthat makes the prison experience manageable by providing the inmate the ‘company’ ofhis own words, whilst at the same time ironically exposing the inadequacy of language toexpress that experience. In isolation, the prisoner cannot find words to articulate themoment and thus abandons language altogether.

As the textual space foregrounds language’s role in presenting experience, it demon-strates how language shapes those encounters. As Knickerbocker writes, in ecopoetics‘nature and language … do not exist in a simple opposition to each other, whereby natureis the good original and language is the poor, fallen copy’ (2012, 9). Knickerbockerargues that language, too, is original and valuable beyond its ability to ‘copy’. In thispoem, language is significant in itself, expressing the prison experience by articulating thefailure of words to represent the lived reality. Incarceration is bearable for the prisonerbecause he can process it through words, but when faced with a space that defiesdescription or reflection – the isolation cell – it overwhelms him. In a sense, the poemsuggests that words and experience require each other. In this extreme example of radicalsensory deprivation, this poem reveals that words are tied to and entirely dependent uponexperience and, conversely, experience is similarly shaped by words. The speaker’sconstruction of a textual space by accentuating the limitations of language in expressinghis isolation cell experience can be read as an ecopoetic commentary on the ways thatwords and experience are inherently linked. In other words, when considered through thelens of ecopoetics, Green’s ‘Isolation Cell Poem’, which is entirely disconnected fromnature in any traditional sense, reveals that neither words nor experience can exist inisolation. Recognising this, prison ecopoetics reveals the codependence of the multipleelements that constitute experience, thus demonstrating that the prison experience is notshaped only by one facet of incarceration – the physical – but also by a variety of otherfactors that shape and order the imprisonment.

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 319

Acknowledging the connections between language and experience in the prison poemdemands that the speaker reveal the lived environment in which words are composed – theprison setting. The third characteristic of reading prison ecopoetics is acknowledgingforegrounding of the immediate physical space of the prison as a frame for experience,thus reaffirming the mediated nature of all encounters for the inmate. Both Fernandez andMosby do this in the poems previously discussed, emphasising the present physical spaceeven while proceeding beyond. However, this frame is even more apparent in MichelleRoberts’s ‘The Spell’ and Michael Knoll’s ‘Vigil’. In her poem, Roberts, who served timeat the California Institute for Women, embarks on a journey into the mind as a result ofthe cell’s restriction, engaging with the imagination even while the physical space peeksthrough. In ‘The Spell’, she writes:

This room holdsthree full moonsone on a wall sleepingone on a door smilingone dark/distant hanging over red cliffs

my neck and breasts achepulled as I search through a barred window

the fourth moonthe diamond starat its immediate left

a crossed palm & ashesspring buds and cypresspurple leavescherry wine colored sap

wood/flower/earth smellemanate from my foreheadobvious sent from toomuch held within leaks out (Roberts 1984, 273)8

As in Green’s poem, the speaker here begins by establishing the place (‘this room’).However, the poem quickly moves into an engagement with imagination. She conceivesof ‘three full moons’ in a sequence that briefly moves her out of the prison environmentand into a dream-like state, but the speaker is quickly returned to the physical when sherealises that her ‘neck and breasts ache’ from stretching to look ‘through a barredwindow’. The pain and discomfort of the physical space intrudes upon the imagined.The movement from the real-world cell into imagination and back again demands that thereader remain aware of the physical space in which the poem is composed. Regardless ofthe imaginative journey taken by the speaker, it is continually framed and re-framedwithin the context of the prison cell.

Larson argues that ‘[d]issociation in prison writing is a necessary alienation of the selfthat is inspired by the particular prison conditions that a state and its people allow to exist’(2010, 159). Inspired by the lack of exposure to stimulating physical environmentsbeyond the cell, the speaker turns towards imagination to express those desires. Whenthe speaker returns to the imagination, remarking on the ‘fourth moon’ that she imaginesfrom looking through her window, the poem’s form marks a shift as it staggers across the

320 S. Nolan

page. Afterword, the lines return to the left margin but recount natural imagery likely notpresent in her view from the cell window (‘pam & ashes’, ‘buds and cypress’, ‘purpleleaves’). It is when the speaker engages with these imagined natural images that shereveals the prison’s limitations. As Bell Gale Chevigny writes, in prison ‘[n]ature is themore valued for its scarcity.… Tributes to birds nesting in penitentiary beams or swoopinginto yards testify both to human hunger for transcendence and its cruel starvation’ (2011,‘Introduction’). The scarcity of nature for the speaker causes an accumulation of frag-ments that must somehow emerge. The images of ‘wood/flower/earth smell’ that areconjured up in the previous stanza here begin to seep from the speaker’s mind. Asthese natural images ‘emanate’ from her, she reveals that it is the result of ‘too/muchheld within’ finally emerging. Deprived of real nature, her imagined images build up andremain locked in her head, only to eventually be forced to seep out. In this way, thespeaker’s reflections on imagination and the deprivation of the cell are interrupted byreminders of physical space. By reiterating the present lived space, the speaker does notwander too far into imagination and reminds readers of the context of the imagining – thecell. An ecopoetic examination of this prison poem, then, locates the speaker’s encountersin both places as vital to her experience of incarceration. Both the imagined nature of thepoem and the reality of the cell constitute the prison experience, revealing the multifacetednature of the occurrence and the multiple spaces that compose a single poem.

Knoll’s ‘Vigil’ similarly wanders into the imagination but only within the frame of theprison. That said, ‘Vigil’ does not only use physical space to keep the reader grounded butalso to connect the prison and prisoner with the outside world and frame everydayexperiences within the context of incarceration. Knoll writes:

I remember how dawn releases the prison yard,guntower, each fence from its shadow,though now the dark yields so slowlythis day might have traveled herefrom the other side of the earth, might have firstlit the sky over Europe, an avenue in Warsawand a house where a man has paced since midnightthe musty stillness of his attic, thinking each time a board creaked that soldiersmoved on the stairs and imaginingthat these would be his last moments.he would understand that morningis a kind of reprieve, its slow comingthe affirmation of everything nightcalled into question, and he might believethat light passes from country to country,one man to another, a sharingthat in these solitary hoursbecomes personal, what allows usin our separate lives to step before windowstwo continents apart, opening our handsto the light of another country, this brightnesswhich comes to us from across the world. (183)9

Early in the poem, the prison is established as the frame for the events to follow. Thespeaker begins by revealing that the poem is composed while looking from ‘the cell’s onewindow’ for the sunrise in ‘the prison yard’ (Knoll 1984, 138). The potential violence ofthe ‘guntower’ and the restriction of ‘each fence’ that surrounds the yard establish anenvironment of constraint, order and fear. From the start, then, the reader is made aware of

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 321

the poem’s physical environment and conscious of the ways in which that space shapesthe representations of space that follow. While without the frame, the poem would appearto engage issues of globalisation, human brotherhood and even politics generally, thereader’s knowledge of the physical space in which the poem is composed highlights itsintended connection to spaces outside the prison walls.

For the inmate, though, the frame is not only informative but also restrictive. In theopening line, the speaker reveals that he has waited ‘[f]or hours’ to watch ‘the sun’ to risefrom his prison cell (Knoll 1984, 183). While he waits for the sunrise in the physicalpresent, once the speaker evokes images of the prison he turns away from the livedexperience of the sunset and towards memory. Confined by his physical environment, thespeaker begins to ‘remember’ the look and feel of dawn and considers its globalsignificance. Unable to fully escape the restriction of the prison, he turns instead towardsan imaginative journey but it is always mediated by the knowledge that the prison’s spaceframes the experience. By moving the physical space to the fore, the speaker does notattempt to present a pseudo-authentic experience of the sunrise, but embraces and valueshis own mediated encounter with it. In doing so, the poem engages in a ‘recover[y of]agency through a willed, virtual relocation of the prison writer himself’ (Larson 2010,145). His vision of the sunrise from prison is framed by his current place but also hismemories of dawn from his past. This examination of prison ecopoetics, then, reveals thatexperiences are composed of many layers and diverse spaces. In this poem, Knoll engageswith the mental space of memory within the context of the prison’s physical space.

Prison ecopoetics is uniquely poised to contend with and reveal the various physical,mental, cultural and even textual spaces that compose experience. While the physicalenvironment is one aspect of this poetry, its engagement with that space is often inspired,infused and even shaped by the inmate’s memories, emotions and even poetic styles. It isthe interplay of these various spaces and methods, along with many others, that positionthis poetry to be read in terms of ecopoetics. For the prisoner, these spaces are particularlypresent and distinct. Deprived of the variety of physical experience available to the typicalpoet, the prison poet must infuse mental, cultural, imagined and textual components intohis or her work. It is through the interplay of these spaces that the prison poet can expressthe complexity of his or her concrete experiences during incarceration and through thisthat the multifaceted environment of prison can be glimpsed by the reader. In doing so, webecome more aware of the conditions in American prisons and the ways prisoners contendwith those realities. Even more clearly, though, this discussion reveals the ways that thoseconfined to sparse environments engage with spaces and how the interaction of thosespaces in poetry can be read ecopoetically. Considering prison ecopoetics illustrates that,unlike in ecology’s scientific roots, the ‘ecology’ of poetry does not emerge from therelations of only natural elements but from the balance of our own radically differingmethods of and abilities to perceive and engage with the world.

Notes1. Reprinted from Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing by permission of Arcade Publishing,

and imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.2. As a key term in this argument, it is important to realise the subtle distinctions between

ecopoetics and ecopoetry – two terms that are often used interchangeably. While many scholarsview these two terms in the same way, ecopoetry properly refers to a genre of poetry itself andis often interpreted widely by poets and scholars as a genre that engages specifically withenvironmentalism through nature and environmental activism, often by means of poetic experi-mentation. Ecopoetics, on the other hand, is a theoretical mode that considers the ways in which

322 S. Nolan

poets capture the complexity and simultaneity of lived experience through language and form.In other words, ecopoetics is a reading practice that considers how environing elements ofspace, memory, history and nature become legible within poetic expression, rather than lookingsolely at the influence of the physical world.

3. Aaron Moe’s article on E.E. Cummings entitled ‘Cummings’s Urban Ecology: An Explorationof EIMI, No Thanks, and the Cultivation of the Ecological Self’ and Sharla Hutchison’s study ofMarianne Moore, ‘The Eco-Poetics of Marianne Moore’s “The Sycamore”’, both appeared inthe Autumn (2011) (18.4) issue of ISLE. Kirstin Hotelling Zona’s article on Mary Oliver, ‘“AnAttitude of Noticing”: Mary Oliver’s Ecological Ethic’, appeared in the Summer (2011) (18.1)issue of ISLE.

4. There are a number of collections of prison writing, but not specifically of prison poetry.5. Although not applicable to this discussion of American prison ecopoetics, it should be noted

that Lavinia-Ileana Geambei’s (2012) published conference presentation titled ‘Nature-Imageryin the Poetry of Communist Prisons’ does consider how traditional concepts of nature maketheir way into inmate poetry.

6. Printed with permission from George Mosby, Jr’s estate.7. Printed with permission of the editor, Joseph Bruchac.8. Although we have made every reasonable effort to locate Michelle Roberts to confirm copyright

ownership and obtain formal written permission to reproduce the poem, we have been unable todo so. If Michelle Roberts declares in future, we shall arrange to publish a Corrigendum toreflect Michelle Robert’s attribution of copyright.

9. Although we have made every reasonable effort to locate Mark Knoll to confirm copyrightownership and obtain formal written permission to reproduce the poem, we have been unable todo so. If Mark Knoll declares in future, we shall arrange to publish a Corrigendum to reflectMark Knoll’s attribution of copyright.

Notes on contributorSarah Nolan is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she works onAmerican poetry and ecopoetics. Her dissertation considers new applications for ecopoetic theorythrough its appearance in unlikely environments.

ReferencesBruchac, J., ed. 1984. The Light From Another Country: Poetry From American Prisons. New York:

Greenfield Review Press.Chevigny, B. G., ed. (1999). 2011.Doing Time: 25 Years of PrisonWriting. NewYork: Arcade Publishing.Davies, I. 1990. Writers in Prison. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.Durand, M. 2010. “The Ecology of Poetry.” In The Eco Language Reader, edited by B. Iijima,

114–124. New York: Portable Press.Elder, J. 1985. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. 2nd ed. Athens:

University of Georgia Press.Evans, M. M. 2002. “ ‘Nature’ and Environmental Justice.” In The Environmental Justice Reader:

Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy, edited by J. Adamson, M. M. Evans, and R. Stein, 181–193.Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Fernandez, R. R. 1982. “poem for the conguero in D yard.” In Doing Time: 25 Years of PrisonWriting, edited by Bell Gale Chevigny, 53–4. New York: Arcade Publishing.

Franklin, H. B. 1998. Prison Writing in 20th-Century America. New York: Penguin.Geambei, L.-I. 2012. “Nature-Imagery in the Poetry of Communist Prisons.” Paper presented at the

conference on Language and Literature: European Landmarks of Identity, Piteşti, June 8–10.Green, J. C. 1975. “Isolation Cell Poem.” In First Words, edited by J. Bruchac, 21. New York:

Greenfield Review Press.Hutchison, S. 2011. “The Eco-Poetics of Marianne Moore’s ‘The Sycamore’.” ISLE:

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18 (4): 763–778. doi:10.1093/isle/isr106.

Johnson, R., and N. Chernoff. 2002. “ ‘Opening a Vein’: Inmate Poetry and the Prison Experience.”The Prison Journal 82: 141–167. doi:10.1177/003288550208200201.

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 323

Knickerbocker, S. 2012. Ecopoetics: the Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press.

Knoll, M. 1984. “Vigil.” In The Light From Another Country: Poetry From American Prisons,edited by J. Bruchac, 183. New York: Greenfield Review Press.

Lamberton, K. 2000. Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist’s Observations from Prison. SanFrancisco, CA: Mercury House.

Larson, D. 2010. “Toward a Prison Poetics.” College Literature 37 (3): 143–166. doi:10.1353/lit.0.0131.

Miller, D. Q. 2005. Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States. Jefferson,NC: McFarland.

Moe, A. 2011. “Cummings’s Urban Ecology: An Exploration of EIMI, No Thanks, and theCultivation of the Ecological Self.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment18 (4): 737–762. doi:10.1093/isle/isr107.

Morton, T. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge:Harvard University Press.

Mosby, G. 1984. “Variations on a Late October Day.” In The Light From Another Country: PoetryFrom American Prisons, edited by J. Bruchac, 236. New York: Greenfield Review Press.

Roberts, M. 1984. “The Spell.” In The Light From Another Country: Poetry From AmericanPrisons, edited by J. Bruchac, 273. New York: Greenfield Review Press.

Shelton, R. 2007. Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as A Prison Volunteer. Tucson: University ofArizona Press.

Skinner, J. 2001. “Editor’s Statement.” Ecopoetics 1: 5–8.Zimmerman, J. 1995. Trapped Under Ice: A Death Row Anthology. Brunswick: Biddle.Zona, K. H. 2011. “ ‘An Attitude of Noticing’: Mary Oliver’s Ecological Ethic.” Interdisciplinary

Studies in Literature and Environment 18 (1): 123–142. doi:10.1093/isle/isr001.

324 S. Nolan