“I too am ambiguous, strong. I too am the son of a West Indian island that stands alone, but still belongs to everyone. I am different in lifestyle choice and refuse to be judged by anything other than the content of my character. I too am here, I too am love. In essence, I too am.”
This is a poem written by an inmate of Coffeewood Correctional Center during a five-minute freewrite portion of a poetry workshop with EMU’s American Manhood class last week. Twelve students, led by the class’ professor Marti Eads, set off early Friday morning for a short visit to the correctional center in Mitchells, Va. Though originally planning to spend the entire day with a group of inmates, the class was informed of a schedule change at the prison several days prior which ultimately limited their time to less than two hours. However, the group adapted accordingly and took full advantage of the opportunity to create a safe space of literary discussion with a focus on poetry during their short time at the correctional center.
American Manhood is an EMU class with an “emphasis on texts that interrogate our conceptions of what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a U.S. citizen or a U.S. resident,” according to Eads. The course’s heavy focus on literature prepared students for their visit to the correctional center.
After passing through a security check around 9 a.m. Friday morning, the group was directed into a separate room, the features of which were identical to those of any other classroom, as described by junior Lydia Chappell-Deckert, one of the twelve students on the trip. The students intermixed with the nine inmates in a circle and began their collaborative poetry workshop, which mainly focused on analyzing poems from Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Martin Espada, and Wendell Berry, who the class selected before the visit.
Chappell-Deckert also described the workshop’s free-write activity as the most moving part of the workshop. “We were given the poem ‘I, Too Sing America,’ which is about an African American person’s space in the song of America,” ChappellDeckert explained. “Then we were given a prompt to write our own poem based off of the “I, Too” poem. The inmates were invited to share, and some of the poems that they came up with were amazing.”
Junior Clara Weybright described the calm, open atmosphere of the workshop. “It wasn’t near as intense as I expected,” Weybright recounted from the visit. “All of the staff members were kind and respectful of the inmates. There was one woman who accompanied us for the whole visit, and she understood that all the inmates had important things to say.” Analyzing poetry and sharing poems of their own appears to have been an exceptionally unique experience for inmates and EMU students alike.
