The Griffin Imperative

[POEM SONG DI BOS - LA NUOVA PRIMAVERA]

SHAUN GRIFFIN: 

Learning to Polish Razor Wire—Elegy for Bobby Gonzales (by Shaun Griffin)

You lie face up in the obituary

like an owl with no moon to wing by,

the dirge of Alzheimer’s finally slowed.

For twenty years you wrote poems

in the workshop—small, cryptic

epigrams to the past—the scar 

laced throughout—and we listened, 

not knowing how to intercede

save their passage to the page.

[Lullaby-like music plays]

IZZY SANTINALLES: At first, I had delusions of grandeur with poetry simply because I thought, “well, you know, I can understand music some,” so I thought, “anybody can write this stuff.” But that’s what I went in with, and what I came out with was so much more than just knowing how to write a poem because what poetry does to the inside of a man who listens to himself while he’s writing poetry is a complete transformation of his thinking, his being. I am a strong believer of the phrase: “poetry saves lives.” 

GRIFFIN: Izzy, I'm really glad that you ended with that statement, poetry saves lives. 

This process of learning to write poetry, really began to be a process of keeping people alive, especially inside. What happens so often inside is you just begin to give up and you think there isn’t anybody there that cares. What happens so often in prison is that you lose that identity. You don’t remember anymore that you’re a person. You start living in another identity. My role was to intercede at that moment and keep people’s humanity in the room.

[Upbeat, side-scroller-like music plays]

SANTINALLES: My name is Ismael Santinalles, that’s the name given to me at birth, but everyone calls me Izzy because it’s more compact and it lends itself to poetry. Being poets, you have to condense everything, so here we are. There’s shh, and that’s short for Shaun, or poetic for Shaun, and I’m Izzy.

GRIFFIN: My name is Shaun Griffin, and I’m happy to be talking about Razorwire, which is a workshop out at the poetry out of the prison where I’ve been volunteering for many moons. We’ve had a lot of different people in the workshop over those years. I’ve become very close to several of them.

The workshop began by accident really. I was out there teaching for the college, and they closed the program down. I finally said, “well, you know, I really enjoy doing this. I’m going to keep going on.” And it was cleaner that way. No grades, no credit, just people that wanted to write. 

SANTINALLES: I was 23 years old in 1984, when I first went into prison. It was about six or seven years after that that I joined the workshop. At that point, I had no hope for ever getting out. I had two life sentences running wild. In other words: one after the other, “consecutive,” as they say. 

The problem with that inside of a kid’s mind—because at 23 years old, you’re still transforming yourself into a man—at that stage in life, we have no idea what 20 years looks like. And when a 23-year-old mind tries to imagine 20 years ahead, especially in such a dark place, there’s no real image that comes to mind and no real sense of hope. It’s just a big, blank page that has one tiny word right on top, and it says “desolation.”

[Ominous church bell rings out]

And you go there because that’s the only word you know. And you go there. 

When I went from maximum security prison to the medium security prison. I met a man who had been in prison by then—his name’s Gary—and became friends with this man. One day he says, “Why don’t we go take some laps?” So, we went and took laps. 

[Ominous music, reminiscent of a gothic choir, plays in the background]

We stopped at the snack bar—it was a Saturday—and we bought a Coke and we went walking. And at one point, he stops me and he says, “you see that guy over there?” It was the endemic lifer with a stained coffee mug, stained fingertips from his Bugler cigarettes, and he says, “watch.”

And there was almost a lifelessness in his eyes, but as he’s walking by, and he walks past us as well, and, I don’t know what it is, out of instinct, I moved out of his way. 

I mean, he’s not a threatening man. He was about my height, out of shape, but just nobody that you would have to worry about in a physical confrontation, but, for some reason, instinctually, I just got out of his way. 

Gary, then, turns to me and he goes, “what do you think is wrong with him?” And we talked about that a little bit as we walked. His summation was simply that this man had no soul, that his soul had died.

He allowed me to mull that over while we took a few steps more, and then he stops me and he says, “if you don’t change, you’re going to end up like that.”

At that point, that was the biggest catharsis for me to get myself changed, to change. 

[Melodic, laid-back guitar fades in]

One of Shaun’s very first rules, I ended up calling the “Griffin imperative,” was “write only what, you know.” And I thought to myself, “well hell, I can do that. Anybody could do that.” So, I started trying to write what I knew. Man, it turns out that what I knew was, in my opinion, not worth writing about. That’s where I start to dig into the dictionary, trying to find specific words that meant what I felt.

That’s part of the starting process of healing myself from myself. I was my own disease.

GRIFFIN: Yeah, write what you know. 

What I was trying to say to everybody in the room, and especially to people like Izzy who were looking at a long sentence, was to tell me your life. Tell me your experiences. Tell me how you became who you are. Tell me what you’re trying to do now. Again, going back to finding a way to affirm who they were as people. 

You know, we would get to the tough and difficult parts of learning the art form. It’s an art form that can never be mastered. It’s like learning to play the violin. You can only improve at it, but you can never master it.

The irony, though, is that this class, this workshop, serves a life-saving purpose inside. Once people leave prison, it’s very difficult to stay connected. Real life comes bearing down in. You have to work and you have to stay alive, and that's the single thing that kept me returning—keeps me returning—was the men in the room. 

And that’s the reality. I mean, that’s just part of the game, and the game is prison. So, in the midst of the dynamics of insanity of prison, me, Shaun, has to find a way to be authentic, to be real to keep those individuals in that room alive. That’s the lifesaving thread. These individuals matter and what happened, whatever happened, that got them into prison is not how they define themselves today.

SANTINALLES: You want to make an, a prisoner cry? Treat him like a human being.

The one thing that really transforms other human beings: humanity. Treat someone else like a human being. That’s the humanity in all of us. You stop doing that and you start losing your humanity. 

Shaun was able to do that with poetry, with the poetry workshop. 

I mean, we were... We were all in for different things. I was in for murder. 

But, it didn’t matter. When we coalesced as a workshop, we coalesced as a group of men willing to expose our hearts, and it was through that sense of giving yourself over to the process that we began to change. 

It really affected me. People have no idea what goes on in a man’s mind, a prisoner’s mind, when he walks away from that workshop and he goes to his cell and sits there with a lamp at night reading Hayden Carruth’s Emergency Haying. When you read Frost, page 1 to page 200, without stopping because this guy has a really wonderful way of bringing to light humanity. All these poets, everyone we read, was wonderfully gifted at that one thing: teaching us about humanity. 

[Lullaby-like music plays]

And it is that self-evaluation, that self-analysis, that quiet self-analysis, that occurs when you’re looking for the right word.

I had to actually ask myself those questions: “why isn’t that word the right word?” And then, when I finally found the word, “why is that word the right word?”

And that was that slow, poetic transformation that occurred within my soul that was able to get me out of that darkness so that I wouldn’t turn into my soulless friend walking around the yard 20 years later with a stained coffee mug.     

And so that’s the transformation that occurs when you’re looking for the right word as a writer, as a poet, anyway. 

[Lullaby-like music plays]

GRIFFIN: I wanted to bring in the poems that seemed to me most germane to their lives and began to tell the story of their lives. And once they read those poems, they could find a way in to articulating their experience.

I wanted them to find their own voices. I want everyone to write from their truth, and they each have a truth. And it’s an incredible truth.

[Music plays to fade out]