And this is how a poem by Kirk Nesset made it into the pages of Poetry. Nesset, a 63-year-old former Allegheny College English professor, pleaded guilty in 2015 to possession, receipt, and distribution of child pornography; he was sentenced to 76 months in federal prison and released this fall. He is now on the sex offender registry in Arizona.
From the moment the issue came out, sexual violence survivors, victims’ advocates, and assorted feminists began raining angry tweets, blogs, and public statements on Poetry and its publisher, the Poetry Foundation. A Change.org petition demanding that the magazine remove the poem and apologize to “Nesset’s voiceless victims, their readers and subscribers, and victims of sexual violence everywhere” gained over 1,600 signatures in a week. By then the story had spread as far as New Delhi.
Reaver Beach's owners were expecting to open their new location this week, but had to change their plans after an employee tested positive for the coronavirus. The new opening date is Friday, Feb. 19.
Olivia mentions a blonde girl who makes her doubt the relationship. Fans have interpreted
Sabrina‘s lyrics, “Maybe then we could pretend / There’s no gravity in the words we write / Maybe you didn’t mean it / Maybe ‘blonde’ was the only rhyme,” as a response to
Olivia‘s.
Radio.com on Wednesday (February 3),
Sabrina was asked about her inclusion of the “blonde” line and how she felt people would interpret it.
“At the end of the day, the more I dance around the subject, the less people kind of understand where I’m coming from,”
Sabrina explained. “Not that the goal is to get them to understand, ‘cause I don’t think at the end of the day you’re ever going to accomplish that. But the more honest I could be in that moment, and that fact is, exactly what I said, it wasn’t a call out to one person. That situation is a situation, and plenty of other things have happened in this past year alone in my life that I was like, ‘it’s getting to be
cause love is an acid
that eats away bars. Assata Shakur
The editors of this issue read thousands of poems submitted by people who have experienced incarceration, which were winnowed down to the sampling here. We have been working collectively toward publication since 2017. The contributors, who are often no longer perceived as people in the non-incarcerated world, are indeed human. Many of them have partners, families, friends, and try to help other people. Some of them have made mistakes. Some have faced cycles of violence and abuse themselves. I hope that people come to this issue with open minds, and I’d like to underscore that openness by saying that poets are not members of the jury. No one undertook this project to declare a verdict on any of the contributors therein. Although many of these poems are about the lived experiences of being contained sometimes indefinitely by the state, we discovered poems about subjects that some of us hadn’t considered. We read the w
Martín Espada
Artists incarcerated in prisons have frequently told me that making art was like encountering an unlocked door art provided a momentary way out from the confines of state control. During long days, where tedious rules organize life and boredom is punishing, artists were able to scratch out a line or mix a color that could breathe a little air into the small cells that lock up so many people across this nation at shameful rates. Making art doesn’t necessarily change the material conditions of prison, but it can change psychic ones. Art gives the artist another language, another tool to fight for freedom. For the first time in fifteen years of working with artists in Illinois prisons, I have started to hear a different story, one of despair and fatigue. With COVID-19 raging in congregate living spaces, of which prisons are prime hot spots, artists, poets, and, indeed, all people locked behind fences and walls are on the edge. In many prisons, people have been on cons