Sarah Rupp

Professor Coogan
Prison Literature
October 29, 2015
Muffled Poetics and Incarceration
While baking in the heat of a warehouse-stye jail in a remote Arizona desert, Dannie
Martin wrote: Society is creating a class of men with nothing to lose but their minds. (Martin
349). He witnessed what I am going to refer to as a greyification. The prisoners around him had
long term sentences from federal drug laws. Some who will get out may be so old that they
wont remember coming in, (Martin 346). This greyification is bolstered by an enormous
increase in the prison population and thus a rapid expansion of prisons. Foucault explains the
change from brutal public executions to sonorous private imprisonment not as rehabilitative, but
out of the states need for the creation of docile bodies in a controlled environment. The aspects
of this environment are an exercise of power on behalf of the state and they contribute to the
overall poverty of information and dearth of stimuli that the prisoner must live with. Effects of
this small and controlled community have leaked into the poetry of those who are imprisoned
there.
There are few things offered to the prisoner to let them feel autonomous and dignified
besides reading and writing, yet their writing is not free because it is not created in a context free
of constraint. The choices possible to us are a result of both our local, immediate setting, as well
as the historical context in which that setting came to be. At any given time and place, there are a
limited number of possibilities that are intelligible, (Arford 81). The sterile, enclosed, and
unstimulating environment of prison leads to a form of muffled poetics: poems with an absence
of precise color in their imagery.
Before I give my explanation of why these poems are muffled, I will first show you that
they are muffled. I want to begin by looking at the work of Charles Chuck Culhane. When
paroled in 1992, he had been imprisoned for twenty-six of his forty-eight years. When I say his
work is muffled, I am describing something in both tone and imagery that relates to a quality of
his work that is separate from good or bad. It is not an insult, but a fact. That his work is muffled
and still compelling is even more credit to him as a writer.

Im older now, the list grows

the edges of the paper curl up, turn brown.
The names still cry out
without voice
without ear to hear them
and I cant remember what it was
I was supposed to do
except live nearer the fire.
-Charles Culhane Of Cold Places

To my right, a slip of colored sail

goes downriver
behind the old death house.
 -Charles Culhane Autumn Yard

Amidst the bustle & the boredom

of maximum security life
he lit three candles on the bars
& sat on the end of his bed w/prayerbook.
-Charles Culhane First Day of Hannukah

Then the gulls came

hollow desperate and shrieking
replacing the peaceful feeding rituals
with survivals bare wings
beating at the windows.
-Charles Culhane There Isnt Enough Bread

In Of Cold Places, we hear of the narrators attempt to keep a growing list of prisons
that he will one day give voice to in his writing. What develops instead is the browning of pages
as the list grows, curls up, and ages. This physical greyification happens alongside a more
metaphysical one; he hears the names on the list cry out/without voice and he cant remember
what it was that he was supposed to do. With the erosion of the list and the continuation of his
time in prison, a lid is turned shut around his mind. He cant access those places and they cannot
access him. Without color in his cell, without information on the outside world, his visualization
is muted to only brownness and silence.
Autumn Yard leaves the cell to go through the regimented time outside in the prison
yard. Even with access to something visually new, a slip of colored sail, the narrator doesnt
name the color and then the sail fades out of view behind the old death house. There are two
other prisoners, one works out while the other sits with hands scrunched in wordless pockets
while faded pennants / snap in the wind. Again, the color of the pennants is eluded to but left
out. The sounds he articulates are silence and the puncture of the snapping pennants blowing in
the wind, which have been eroded by the source of the sound (wind) under the peaceful sun
over an extended and greyifying period of time. The colors of objects are sunk in the murk of a
monotonous day. He sees everyone he knows, and they all do the same thing. A sails beauty is
overpowered by a grotesque and rotting death house
Re-entering the cell, in First Day of Hannukah the narrator describes to us his neighbor,
Old Doc, who put an electric blue yarmulke / over wild shocks of white hair. This moment was
so abnormal, he describes it as Inseparable from weighty congested traffic / of bodies that
are normal in the bustles & the boredom / of maximum security life. That the colors are not
only pointed out but named shows their unusual appearance in his field of vision they are a
welcome intrusion. The electric blue of the yarmulke almost mocks the white hair of its
wearer. The color is only colorful because it is foddered by the overwhelming grey, the desert of
stimuli in the mediocre prison.
While Culhanes work is blatantly ashen and leaden like the prison he is kept in, other
writes do make use of color despite their incarceration. How can this be accounted for? One
poem that shows the struggle to avoid a slippage into muffled poetics is M.A. Jones Prison
Leter. The poem begins:

You ask what its like here

but there are no words for it.
I answer difficult, painful, that men
die hearing their own voices. That answer
isnt right though and I tell you now
that prison is a room
where a man waits with his nerves
drawn tight as barbed wire, an afternoon
that continues for months, that rises
around his legs like water
until the man is insane
and thinks the afternoon is a lake:
blue water, whitecaps, an island
where he lies under pale sunlight, one
red gardenia growing from his hand

Jones describes the muffled room of a prison cell as suffocating in its lack of stimulation.
The incarcerated men / die hearing their own voices with their nerves / drawn tight as barbed
wire in an afternoon / that continues for months. The anxiety comes in like water slowly
filling a sinking ship. But rather than describing darkness as the end of boredom, we see a volta;
Jones says that once the man is insane, his cell is transformed into mirage of blue water,
whitecaps, an island. What more, an inexplicable red gardenia grows from the inmates hand.
Juxtaposed to Culhanes grey poetry of the present, Jones poem dips into what it is like when
the present is no longer held accountable by logic. After profound silence and jarring greyness,
the mind slips and the red gardenia blooms despite the monotony of prison life.
Yet, Jones poem continues and their message changes:

But thats not right either. There are no

flowers in these cells, no water
and I hold nothing in my hands
but fear, what lives
in the absence of light, emptying
from my body to fill the large darkness
rising like water up my legs:

It rises and there are no words for it

though I look for them, and turn
on light and watch it
fall like an open yellow shirt
over black water, the light holding
 against the dark for just
an instant: against what trembles
in my throat, a particular fear
a word I have no words for.

The key to understanding the relationship between the environment of the incarcerated
and the formation of muffled poetics can be found in this turn. There are no / flowers in these
cells, writes Jones. Just the large darkness / rising like water up my legs: / It rises and there are
no words for it / thought I look for them. We are then hit with an image of a light turning on,
which is compared to the fall of an open yellow shirt / over black water. While the light Jones
describes can hold out against the dark for just / an instant, he is still feeling an intense,
quaking fear, a word I have no words for. We see the slippage of color falling into a total,
damning blackness create an enormous anxiety in Jones. They had emptied their mind to fill the
dullness of the cell, but when they are at a loss of words, there is nothing left to fill the cell. This
is Jones struggling with their dread of greyification. They know that muffledness is coming, and
their capacity to create vividly is slipping away from them like a yellow shirt into black water.
So though Jones can create poems with vivid colors in spite of incarceration, it might be done as
a way for them to keep themselves from slipping into muffled poetics.
After seeing how the poetry of the incarcerated is muffled, it is important to ask why. It
may sound obvious, but the visible, physical conditions of prison are horribly unstimulating to
the prisoners. Paired with a long sentence, one could understand why greyness would be on the
mind of the prisoner. I think these visible conditions of concrete, iron, and municipal gray are
best described by Roger Jaco in the Easter stanza of Killing Time:

With captured friends

beneath the dull coolness
of a concrete sky
I sit and sweat
inwardly.
Drenched in bitterness,
smelling of remorse,
we tug and strain
under laden backpacks
of unwanted time.

I hope to answer more exactly how a prison environment can modify language in my next
paper, but will touch on it here. A prison has the aesthetic qualities of what Marc Aug would
describe as a non-place. Aug writes in his work Non-Places that If a place can be defined as
relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as
relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced
here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves
anthropological places (78). A non-space lacks the organic qualities of a place. Despite
however long an inmate is in prison, prisons are built and controlled to be temporary,
rehabilitative spaces. Some are so similar to one another that they look as though they come
from the same can.
To have variety in sights, smells, and sounds is a part of our creation of variety within our
language; to lose these differentiations is to lose words. E.A. Chatman also writes about how the
rounded environment of prisons changes how prisoners find information: For one, their world is
one in which the information needs and its sources are very localized. For another, it is one in
which outsiders are usually not sought for information and advice. And it is a world in which
norms and mores define what is important and what is not, (Outsider 205). Chatman also
found that social location has a direct influence on language (Life in the Round 210). Through
systematic discipline, sensory deprivation, and an overwhelming poverty of information,
prisoners have a trampled emotional experience that muffles their poetry.