As a poet, Betts belongs in our classrooms because of both his story and his art. He details his time in prison and the inescapable condition of his history: his poetry neither celebrates nor denies it. In
Felon
, his poems refuse to forget men still imprisoned. Betts writes of times when he cannot help but tell his story, even while knowing he cannot control the responses of the listeners— including his own sons. His “Essay on Reentry” begins:
At two a.m., without enough spirits
spilling into my liver to know
to keep my mouth shut, my youngest
learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell,
a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky,
but History: I robbed a man.
The poem describes the partial redemptions that come as he moves forward in life with a family and a future as well as the acknowledged past. Betts is currently planning a national tour of prisons to perform his poetry with blues guitarist Reed Turchi. And his works also capture the inescapable in living as a Black man in these times: “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving”
includes:
. . . my rhetoric is always about what I don’t
like, not what I fear, because sometimes
I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping
all another insignificance, all another way to avoid
saying what should be said: the Second Amendment
is a ruthless one
Felon
includes four “redacted” poems, created from legal documents. Betts described these works in a recent NPR interview: “
I wanted to redact everything that was superfluous so that when you pick it up and read it, you say that this is the thing that matters. This is the thing that makes you hurt.”
Like many English teachers, I use redaction or blackout techniques with Shakespeare soliloquies, where students have a page to edit through eliding. They choose the twenty words they feel are central to the speech and the character, crossing out or otherwise erasing the rest, and illustrating the page to further represent their theme or idea about the character. The
Felon
redacted poems can be a mentor text for this kind of creative and critical work, enabling students to see how they can make meaning from documents and claim an authority over what matters.
