Lyric Forms for Carceral Justice: On Attica Prison and Celes Tisdale’s “When the Smoke Cleared”
Los Angeles Review of Books, April 30, 2023: Lyric Forms for Carceral Justice: On Attica Prison and Celes Tisdale’s “When the Smoke Cleared”
“…Eight months after these events had been broadcast on TV to an appalled nation, Celes Tisdale, an English professor at the State University College at Buffalo, began a poetry workshop with Attica inmates, leading to an anthology first published in 1974 (as Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica) and recently republished with additional material by Duke University Press. The telling of this history is not yet finished. When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal, an anthology of work by 24 incarcerated writers as well as Tisdale, is a riveting contribution to contemporary literary history and recent social histories of the uprising. This volume poses far-reaching questions about prisons as sites of cultural production and the mobilization of Black political subjectivity at the beginning of what we now call the age of mass incarceration.
“Tisdale writes in his new preface that he was likely the first non-inmate African American poetry instructor in a US prison. Over three years, despite unreliable logistical support from Attica authorities and shifting funding sources, he gathered an urgent group for writing poetry, practicing criticism, and exploring literary history. From his teaching journals, we learn that Tisdale drove in all seasons from Buffalo to Attica (35 miles), showing up ‘almost every Wednesday’ evening to hold open a fragile space of creativity and literary analysis.
“What exactly do we mean by the term ‘prison poem’? When the Smoke Cleared explains it as, in part, the linguistic sign of a social relationship that resists the social death of incarceration. The poems explore diverse stances of resistance to systemic anti-Blackness in the criminal justice system as embodied by Attica: commemoration of the 43 inmates and employees killed in the military assault ordered by Governor Rockefeller and encouraged by President Nixon; utopian glimpses of the inmates’ democratic self-organization and momentary freedom in the D Yard during the prolonged standoff; and calls for solidarity toward other futures. Reading the anthology is like overhearing a high-stakes, speculative conversation among incarcerated people deciding what is to be done; each voice offers a different valence of resilience, rage, hope, love, and grief.”
Additional reading:
When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal, edited by Celes Tisdale, on bookshop.org
The Paris Review, October 11, 2022: Attica Prison Diary
PEN America Works of Justice Podcast, November 17, 2022: Celes Tisdale on Remembering the Attica Prison Uprising through Poetry
