The young woman’s face was reduced to the tiny slit of a window that the juvenile detention facility’s door had given her: too small even to show hair, it revealed only the nose, squinched eyes, and an open, angry-pink mouth. She screamed about how she would kill us all, and so we put our heads down and wrote. It was all we could do.
I was at the center to offer creative writing courses as part of my Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. The young woman behind the door was being punished, unable to leave her “room” to join us. But she could see us, for each of their individual “rooms” were at the perimeter of this large classroom.
I wasn’t sure what the students would be able to write under such circumstances. Yet when it came time to share, one student read these incisive lines: “I figure myself as a rescue dog that’s / been left alone for too long. / That’s why I choose / wrong.” Another compared herself to macaroni that is hard in places, soft in others: “Some like me and some people don’t,” she wrote matter-of-factly. And one poem stays with me because of its refusal to end on a positive note. The poem begins with the lines: “Sometimes I feel like an hourglass / Slowly ticking away with time.” What follows is the wish to “...turn my hourglass over / And rewind.” But the poem acknowledges how such a wish is only a wish, and ends with these anticlimactic, yet honest words: “...so therefore time / Continues.”
With all of their poems, I was struck by two things: the startling figurative language and the brutal honesty. In a system designed to reduce them, to render them invisible, these young people insisted on their presence—their right to be heard.This insistence to be heard, especially in a system that twists truth and reduces people, correlates all too well with what is happening this spring. As an employee at a state university and a program director, I am, yet again, being asked to scrub language. Last year it was because of SB129, the Alabama state bill that prevents public funds from being used for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. I thought that was the arm to feed the lion, but the lion wants more. For those of us receiving federal funds, there is a new list of banned words that includes accessible, Native American, and pregnant persons. When the teenagers read their poems, I was reminded of poetry’s great power: to hold space for what others have tried to silence. Poetry itself is fundamentally a resistance against oppression. This is hardly a new thought. But in the grips of hopelessness, it can feel far afield, quaint, even insufficient. These young people reminded me what resilience—and resistance—look like. Their poetry was a place where they could finally say what they wanted to say. It was a place where others validated their emotions. Everyone wanted to share what they wrote, and everyone responded with praise. Even the young woman who only glared when I spoke, told one writer, “That’s damn good.”
Poetry and songs are some of our oldest art forms to articulate resistance. Partly why all art forms—and poetry in particular—are key vehicles for resistance is that at their core, they are unpredictable. And it’s that quality that fascists hate, because unpredictability makes a group harder to control.
The story I’m getting ready to tell is one that I’ve kept secret for a long time, one that is not the polite answer I give at readings as to how I came to poetry. You see, I fell in love with poetry during an attempted burglary. This is not a metaphor. I had broken into a neighbor’s apartment because I knew she had some weed, and I was hoping I could sell it to the preps in my eighth-grade class who were afraid to talk to actual dealers. Like any good businessperson, I saw an opportunity.
In truth, I was not so different from the teenagers at that detention center. The luck of the draw had dealt me a tough set of cards. While I had the privilege of my skin color, I also had an abusive dad who suffered from schizophrenia. What’s more, my mom had become entirely incapacitated by a disease when I was nine. Both of those parental facts made our scant income erratic. I was so angry at the world and with those around me—that I had become a force of chaos.
I rummaged through kitchen drawers and bathroom cabinets to no avail, and thus, decided to scour the bookshelves, thinking the neighbor might have hidden the weed behind one of the books or maybe cut out some pages for the stash. Again, no luck. And that’s when I looked down at the book I was holding. It looked too small to be a book. A puny-looking thing with a dingy white cover and the words ARIEL in black font. Under that in purple: Sylvia Plath. Wait … Hadn’t I heard something about her? How she put her head in the oven to kill herself? The thought intrigued me. So, I opened the book.
It turned out to be the smallest major decision of my life. The book cracked open like a door, and I found myself at the threshold of “Lady Lazarus”: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” That ferocity intrigued me, so I kept on reading, moving on to the poem “Morning Song”: “The window square / whitens and swallows its dull stars.” I knew that square, the swallowing, the dull stars.
The voice on that page felt full of rage, chaos, unpredictability—and something else…. The images were conjured so vividly, I felt transported. I could imagine that “cow-heavy” mother groping her way to the crying baby, “mouth opens clean as a cat’s.” I could feel the slime from people picking “the worms off me like sticky pearls.” This anger of being stuck in a cycle that I did not create…. She felt it, too.
I am not going to pretend that I rose from the ashes that day or that all my anger dissipated. But slowly—as I continued to read more and then started to write, I found a place for my chaos. I think back to that young woman’s face in the square window who wasn’t allowed to join our class that day–and can empathize with her rage. She was refusing the confined space she was being forced into. And poetry, through its lines that don’t even reach the side of the page, is indeed where people can expand beyond the constraints that have been placed upon them. And that is where resistance resides.
Charlotte Pence is the author of Code (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), which received the 2020 Book of the Year Award from the Alabama State Poetry Society and was short-listed for Best Indie Poetry Books of 2020 by Foreword Reviews. The director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at University of South Alabama, she serves as the inaugural poet laureate of Mobile, Alabama. In 2024, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Pence will offer poetry workshops to teenagers incarcerated at Mobile’s Strickland Youth Center and on parole under Strickland’s jurisdiction. At the end of the 2024–25 academic school year, the students will celebrate their creative accomplishments with the publication of a print anthology and a ceremony attended by local and state officials. Through this project, Mobile will join the Alabama Writers’ Forum Writing Our Stories Program that aids incarcerated and paroled youth.