Letter to my Napa State Hospital Poetry Students, 2 /18/1988

Letter to my Napa State Hospital Poetry Students

Castles in the Sky Poetry Reading and Book Signing

This is for Liebel, the one-legged, who remembered the poetry of Nazim Hikmet, who thought the T-12 group poem was good. Liebel who also thought our duet poem was also very good, Liebel who wanted to send copies of the poems out to all his friends. Did I have some stamps? Would I mail them for him?

This is for wall-eyed Cecil who came down to earth long enough to read his poem to the group.

This is for Mike who, after 14 years, finally has a new pair of glasses—trifocals—who said he didn't know if he still knew how to read, who like to read his poems out loud to everyone he met.

Ned who's still writing, said that got some love poems published and he proudly told me that they even took some of his earlier work too. No matter that it's a vanity press, costing him $40 a copy for the book. Why should I destroy his pleasure? Would I buy a copy, he asks. Ned, who set his poems to music, all of them, is reading his own poems and other inmates' works.

I learn that Liebel said some books of his poems are coming out – from the words of Bonnie and Brooke, the only two that showed up from his group. I wish more people had come. We signed poetry books and we wish each other well. The patients are wanting to work with me again. We faced the tenuousness of goodbye.

Bonnie tells me that Marcus is out of Napa and living in San Francisco. I have a moment of uneasiness, hoping men who murder their mothers keep it in the family, so to speak. But he is a good writer. I wish him well.

So many on the inside, so many on the outside. Who will survive in either place?

Patricia felt the patients really enjoyed the workshops. She begins to play her broken record complaint about the staff. I gently derail her by saying, we can't make the staff over. But with promises of future work, we part. We both know it won't happen.

I confess to the patients how I was terrified to come here and work with them. I came away pleased with what I had learned about madness, myself, and my own work. I came away with far more that I gave. Everybody so open and vulnerable. Such is the soul of poetry.

It was interesting to be able to compare the adult Napa State Hospital patients' experiences with the high school boys this morning. They have no idea how much freedom they have. Or how good they have it. 

The teacher keeps repeating how they have low skills (say it enough and they will believe you). But none of them are anywhere near as disabled as the Napa State Hospital crew. Poets who rose to the challenge and opened their hearts to poetry.

I marvel at how much closer to poetry the Napa State Hospital inmates are than these out-of-control teenagers—some of whom will eventually wind up here too. Their spirits having failed, their veins filled with drugs, their bodies will become a shell, not a home. 

This much I can't tell them. They will need to work it out for themselves. I wish them well. And am on my way down the long road home for the last time...long shadows in the canyons.

2 /18/1988 (I think)