When I decided to pursue an MFA in poetry, I applied widely and foolishly, and somehow accepted an offer from NYU—an offer I quickly questioned in my first workshop where, when introducing ourselves, I learned I was sitting next to a 23-year-old phenom already published in The New Yorker.
Fuck, I thought, 26 and unpublished. But I wasn’t there for The New Yorker. I was there for love, which to then-me meant the whole world—no, for collective liberation itself.
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During the two-year program, I wrote almost exclusively to and for my incarcerated partner, imprisoned in our home state. I visited when I could, flying home to drive the two hours to one of nearly 30 prisons in Michigan (the one located in, swear-to-god, “Freeland, Michigan”), jerking in and out of prison security, kissing in front of countless corrections officers. I wrote about the officers, the kissing, the security process. I wrote about the boring-ass drives through bum-fuck Michigan; the flights from New York; the subway system. I sent him Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette, and we discussed bell hooks. He sent me annotated collections of new favorites—Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay. Everything by Dwayne Betts, of course.
My primary motivation, when I embarked on the MFA, was to gain skills so I could better write to my partner, so we could continue building a home in a shared world while stuck in the one that kept us apart. By the time I was 25, he’d already been inside for six years, and to sharpen my poetic skills felt, non-hyperbolically, like a life-or-death endeavor, as the longer he was gone, the farther from a shared world we both moved. Our writing became a home we were building, together. It became, I believed, our best and only ticket to liberation from oppressive institutions—including, but not limited to, prison. This “liberation” was both amorphous and mesmeric, and I applied the idea to any and all hegemonic systems that dictate much of the cultural and social expectations espoused and upheld by the United States. Our poetry and creative relationship was enacting abolition, I believed—and I’d come up against an edge. I’d reached the extent of my poetic ability. His writing continued developing at an impressive rate, but I couldn’t let him build our house alone, and furthermore, whatever skills I might gain at “poetry school,” I could pass along to him. My getting an MFA meant we’d both get an MFA. I’d send him my syllabi and readings and books. We’d do it together. Our house would grow taller; be lined with full bookshelves. And everyone in the world would get a house with books. Infinite manna.
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My education in abolitionist and liberatory theory and praxis was slow, such that I was waist-deep before even noticing it was an education upon which I was embarking. I’d had early introductions to “social-justice” framed thought and action, particularly through my secular humanistic Jewish upbringing, which emphasized Tikkun Olam and somehow always managed to circumvent any talk of Palestine. Despite such shocking omission, this background proved fertile ground for transition into other ideas of connection and freedom within a shared world—connection that transcends race, class, age, gender, all those qualifiers that make it easier to walk past a person on the street asking for change, eventually not even registering their face, or their self, at all. In college, I read Paulo Freire, Augustus Boal, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis—thinkers and writers and doers who spoke strongly against colonialism and offered tangible exercises for resisting its persistent rot. In one class, we met Kathy Boudin, the former Weather Underground founder imprisoned for 23 years for her role in the 1981 Brink’s robbery. My understanding of good and bad appropriately scrambled such that I soon no longer even believe in such a binary at all.
At the same time, I tended a yoga obsession—an obsession that would falter upon deeper learnings about cultural appropriation, but at the time showed me an example of how to relate to my body/mind in a more sustainable way than the neurotic, compulsive entwinement I’d built through my teens and early twenties. The Primary Yoga Sutras of Patanjali—a seminal yogic text—suggest that self-study and self-knowledge are necessary endeavors in one’s quest towards “oneness,” which to Patanjali meant “the divine,” but which to me meant grand interconnectedness among all people.
I’d made for myself a perfect trap—one I now know underlies much of how Whiteness and white saviorism operates: I recognized grand civic and social inequities, and leaned into a belief system that I thought meant my own devotion to whatever we might call “abolitionist” or “liberatory” was a devotion that would ripple outward, forever. That my actions and decisions were so important—on account of their connection to everything—that anything I myself experienced or achieved would be an achievement and experience unto the world.
The absurd naiveté—the self-aggrandizement required to believe my choices alone could create the conditions under which liberation for all would flourish—the whiteness, of it all, is now so obvious the glare hurts my eyes. There is great shame and embarrassment for and on behalf of that self. But if I look beneath the shame and embarrassment, I can acknowledge the sliver of hope that drove me to such beliefs, and such beliefs into me. I had seen no examples of lasting abolition, and in fact heard only of more juvenile “detention centers” being built; houseless populations rising; access to healthcare shrinking. To believe that little me was all that was needed to change the direction of our dying world—well, how delightful, and moreso, what a relief!
Conviction in the power of a single person’s actions formed the framework on which I built, with my incarcerated then-partner, a home that could hold our relationship, and us in it. To believe that our very existence as a couple was radical and revolutionary in and of itself was a balm; all we had was hope that our love and writing was radical enough to free him, thus us, thus everyone, and, lucky us!—hope—in the form of our tireless imagining and poeticizing that imagining, was precisely what we needed.
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When the MFA thesis semester arrived, I had no qualms about poetic content. Prison, obviously, I’d say to myself and anyone who asked. Love, I’d say, less freely but with more certitude. I compiled an attempt at a collection, exhausted and proud of the final manuscript I turned in for my degree. I’d worked myself sick, literally; my love, intuiting the stress, would worriedly message me via the weird prison kiosk, asking if I’d slept or eaten. He couldn’t really know; our communication was as legislated as our visits. Sick and lovesick, I spiraled into madness, landing myself in the same psych ward as Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace. This felt, somehow, more validating even than the time at NYU.
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The details of the end of our relationship are less relevant than the fact of our relationship ending, me still on the grounds of the psych ward. Breakups are easier when one or both of you live locked away somewhere dark, somewhere to which neither of you have a key.
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In the negative space between prison and not, we’d built a home. When we’d broken up, I’d decimated it—our home, our world. Abolition itself. All of liberation. Too, in the psych ward, I was protected by rules and schedules and activities. The structure was such a relief, antithetical to my desire for abolitionism—to thrive like that under the militarism of the institution!
I returned to New York that was less of a world, less aggrandized about my power. I would learn to accept this version of life outside of our partnership, but what of the book I’d written in the life I’d left? My apartment overflowed with remnants of the beforetimes: love poems choked my mind and drawers. The book was mostly done but the world it inhabited had ended, and with it, I stonily realized, my contribution to abolition.
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I’d gotten an MFA in order to learn how to build a home, which would sit on the long and winding path to my then-partner’s freedom, and that of an imaginary all. I’d spent two years learning and practicing and crafting, passing along to him what I was learning and practicing and crafting, not to mention the years before that, the two of us earnestly building a house of cards over and over again until we realized, finally, we’d need a stronger foundation. Not even 30, I’d spent the better part of a decade living to create not just a book, but a life, through words—a life for which we had no model, and few cheerleaders. My writing had become more than writing, more than my life. It was our life, and that of so many people caught in carceral institutions. Now it was a manuscript by and for a disappeared world that involved another person—infinite persons—figuratively and/or literally beyond reach.
Not only could I not bear to look at the poems out of pain, yearning, hysterical nostalgia; I worried too about my ownership of the poems, the experience itself. I’d needed him to write; how could I compile and share the poems alone? The ethics of the problem curdled my creativity. I was no better than Joseph Conrad, lamenting over a deeply harmed “other” from some well-meaning but ultimately toxic vantage, commenting on the horrors of a hegemony to which I still belonged. Upheld, even. I was not incarcerated. What more harm would I be doing to the incarcerated—already among the most marginalized in our society—by putting out a book documenting my very not incarcerated experience of prison?
I know—and knew—this line of questions is unanswerable. I also know, and knew, there might be great value in—and I do apologize—“diving into the wreck,” poking around with my headlamp, perhaps revealing to myself and beyond what sheer guilt and shame had yet prevented me from seeing.
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I did not, right then, “dive into the wreck.” Instead, I put the wreck away. A poem is never finished, only abandoned, echoed the words of professors and mentors. But I was not enacting some age-old poet-wisdom. I simply left the collection in a digital folder and carried on. I didn’t write much for a couple of years. I went back to school. I want a job, I reasoned, as if I could endure a career in policy. As if I believed policy could carry us along the road to abolition.
When COVID-19 hit, I signed up for a remote writing class with the luminous Leila Chatti. At the very least, I figured, I’d meet some people and be not-so-isolated for a couple hours once a week. I wrote more in that 10-week class than I had in the previous 28 months. Our final assignment: write a poem in which you go back on a conviction stated earlier in the poem. The task hooked me immediately.
I started the poem from the conviction I had once believed could both forge a world for my imprisoned love and hold us there, finding the lines, “If you believe that longing can be fed, / wrested by the object of its reaching only when the object reached.” There it was. My writing had finally caught up to the fallacy of my fantasy. I’d assumed our world, built on imagination and longing, would resolve the unrealized togetherness the prison upheld, a belief that I had to abandon, and with it, the manuscript. From this revelation I repeated the lines, “If you believe that longing can be fed, wrested / by the object of its reaching if only reached, you are like me, / how I was, then . . .” This repetition became the hinge on which before and after swung. More fundamentally, I’d realized there was, indeed, a hinge; that there could be an after—to my life, the book, the world. The long road to liberation. The rest of the poem tumbled out, a slightly wiser poet now able to understand the contingency on which I’d placed all my bets. That vexing, impossibly abstract “if.”
Before, “if” had no place in the poems, in our life. We had conviction and promise, only and always. We even said it—always became an incantation, an amen. Introducing “if” allowed me to at least consider the possibility of an after. “If” transformed a certainty to a conditional, the conditional being belief.
Into this condition—or perhaps out from this condition—emerged a parallel world. One in which our love invited, invented, a home, but could not make possible the impossible, unite the “free” with the caged. This was no devastating abandonment of imagination, but instead an expansion of a previously half-constructed thought. In our writing and making and building, we’d been so convinced of our success that we neglected to consider any outcome beyond the sole one we deemed acceptable. To find, through Chatti’s prompted inversion, a reality that held the opposite possibility—us not together—interrupted this faulty binary entirely. If my (our) writing could hold us together and apart, what else could it do? And if writing revealed such infinite possibilities, what did that mean for our lives?
The poem became the final poem in what is now my debut collection, FREELAND. Titled “Revision,” the process of discovery through its writing allowed me to dive back into the manuscript, the one I’d “put away” years prior. With this new option introduced—of an ending beyond togetherness, which we hadn’t achieved—I could enter the existing poems again, differently. The conditional if gave me permission to notice the fear and doubt now so apparent to me in all the poems; fear and doubt I’d worked tirelessly to suppress, both in my writing and conscience, when I’d believed there was only one conclusion to the story of our love.
Allowing the doubt and fear made for a much more complex collection. It also plunged me back into a world of confusion. Daily confronting my former self with suspicion, I didn’t trust the me who wrote those undying love poems. The me that went to grad school on behalf of a man. The me that believed our love had the power to transcend barbed wire, weaponed officers, written law. The me that took—too literally, I could now see—bell hooks’ assertion that “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” hooks wasn’t, had never been, the problem. Bell had said it herself—“we begin to move toward”—not, as I’d taken it, “we do move toward freedom with impenetrable certainty.”
There is no conclusion here, nor in FREELAND. Nor an end to the pursuit of abolition which, many posit, must exist in a constant state of flux.
If.
There is almost always an if, for better or worse. We construct our work, our selves, our lives, our worlds, on the hinges of the conditional. We have no other option, though to constantly consider if’s infinite possibilities would likely stun us. But to not allow the “if” is another danger, creating a false assuredness to which the world does not ascribe. To not allow the if is akin to choreographing a ballet for a stage without gravity. Perhaps a beautiful exercise in imagination, but hardly fit for creating a real performance. And perhaps performance for an audience isn’t the goal. Perhaps the goal is imaginative exercise, in which case the “if” is more important than the production. If, as poet Phillis Wheatley and so many abolitionists I study and admire say, the predecessor for radical change is imagination, then that imagination better be as expansive and inclusive of as many possibilities as one can conjure, including the ones that may seem less personally desirable. And then some.
