♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (ominous music playing) JARRETT ADAMS: When I went to prison I was 19 years old.

How does a 19-year-old adapt to a place where most of the people there aren't going home until they're at the age of retirement?

JEFFREY DESKOVIC: It's a dreadful place.

It's a dark place.

MARTY TANKLEFF: Waking up, and the realization of where you are when you see prison bars, and knowing that the only way to get out of that cell is somebody else has to let you out.

ALAN NEWTON: It's like a chill that you can't shake.

You just feel it.

It's something that you want to escape, but it's just there with you, it's part of who you are.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Then you have no choice.

You have to cultivate some things to go it alone.

"To Prisoners" by Gwendolyn Brooks.

I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.

Dark gardening in the vertigo cold.

In the hot paralysis.

Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.

Where it is dry.

Where it is dry.

I call for you cultivation of victory Over long blows that you want to give and blows you are going to get.

Over what wants to crumble you down, to sicken you.

I call for you cultivation of strength to heal and enhance in the non-cheering dark, in the many, many mornings-after, in the chalk and choke.

McCAIN: Prison was... ELISA NEW: Several years ago, I had a chance to speak with Senator John McCain about this experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Shock, sorrow, anger... NEW: Although Senator McCain had recorded many interviews in which he described his imprisonment, what I wanted to explore with him was a story I'd heard about prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton using poetry to keep their spirits up.

McCAIN: The trail was bad and I felt half mad... NEW: As Senator McCain performed for me 120 lines of a poem he'd memorized in his cell, I began to think about the special power of poetry for those in prison.

It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice... NEW: This is what led me, ultimately, to Gwendolyn Brooks's poem, "To Prisoners."

Winner if the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, Brooks's early poetry shed light on the confined lives of her inner city neighbors.

And by the '60s, she was following some of them into prison, teaching in penal institutions, and mentoring incarcerated poets.

Brooks was one of the poets Reginald Dwayne Betts read in solitary confinement while composing his first book of poems.

- ...which I think is Gwendolyn Brooks' strength.

NEW: And Brooks was also an inspiration to poet Li-Young Lee, whose father was a political prisoner in Indonesia.

I've been working on a play, which is about prisons... NEW: Anna Deavere Smith's play on the school-to-prison pipeline attuned her to the sorrow and hope in Brooks's poem.

And without ever having read Brooks before, the four exonerated men I asked to read "To Prisoners" with me brought the same depth and generosity I remembered hearing in Senator McCain's voice.

- A strength that was transmitted to each other through the walls.

♪ ♪ NEWTON: I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.

Dark gardening in the vertigo cold.

In the hot paralysis.

ADAMS: Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.

Where it is dry.

Where it is dry.

NEW: The first words of the poem are "I call for you."

So I'm wondering what you hear when you hear the "I call for you."

Man, she's a poet of, like, great benediction.

"I call for you."

That's like one of the ancient technologies, one of the ancient technologies in poetry is to call, to summon.

♪ ♪ NEW: The poem, just as its title, is somewhat nonspecific.

Its images are, too.

It doesn't say, "I call to you who are behind bars, (chuckling): who eat bad food."

Instead, it begins "dark gardening in the vertigo cold.

In the hot paralysis."

It's a way in which language can become a medium that speaks to you beyond the sort of articulation of what the individual words mean.

Yeah, vertigo cold.

You can't see up, vertigo.

You can't feel where your feet go.

LEE: Yeah.

Vertigo cold is a form of disorientation.

"In the hot paralysis."

Heat, cold, this is opposing thing.

"In a vertigo cold.

In a hot paralysis."

It's huge extremes in prison.

♪ ♪ ADAMS: I can remember in the wintertime, you don't have a heater or a temperature control in your cell, right?

So, sometimes, oftentimes, those cells are ice cold.

In the summertime, you can't just go and turn the air conditioner on, right?

So those... the walls sweat.

McCAIN: I think, my strongest memory is the heat.

Starting in about March or April, it'd get very hot.

And our rooms were not ventilated.

All of the windows and everything were blocked off cause they didn't want us to see each other.

And it used to get incredibly hot in those rooms, and, of course, we didn't have any hygiene or anything.

We would get boils, you get dysentery.

NEWTON: In the hot type environment, you exhausted.

We get stuck.

We get lazy, we get jaded, and that's what it sound like the "hot paralysis" is.

DEAVERE SMITH: In the hot paralysis.

Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.

BETTS: And then "under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences," which is a double-edged thing, because it's both the actual wolves and coyotes, the actual animals that you hear in the woods in the prisons depending on where you're incarcerated, but it's also the wolves and coyotes who are sometimes like the men in prison.

TANKLEFF: So the wolves and coyotes, to me, is almost symbolic of the officers and the inmates that are always preying on each other in many ways.

You have the officers who will victimize individuals, and you'll have prisoners who will victimize.

ADAMS: That's exactly how the prison culture is.

It makes you feel as if you're alone, you're by yourself, and you're being preyed on.

In a way, maybe she's assigning that coyote and that wolf to the danger in silence.

BETTS: And the reason why it's in "particular silences" is because prison is a place where silence was used to mask all the pain and the suffering.

McCAIN: And that's why they kept us for years in solitary confinement.

Those that did not communicate, it was... had very unfortunate results.

Because they would live inside their own... McCAIN: Exactly.

And they feel abandoned.

BETTS: One of the things you recognize is that the silence in and around prisons is pervasive.

So Joseph Brodsky says, "The people who forgot me will make a city."

And Raymond Patterson says, "There are cities buried inside black men."

♪ ♪ LEE: Where it is dry.

Where it is dry.

I think sterility is the greatest danger here.

We have death tendencies, we do.

So choking, dryness, sterility are attributes of the enemy.

She's giving the benediction, but what she ends on is "chalk and choke."

Like those are the last words.

Yeah, chalk, I mean that is... - What does that chalk do?

- It's powerful.

I don't know what that chalk means.

I mean, to me, the chalk is more, more troubling than the coyotes.

- The chalk and choke... - Feels like alkaline, bones.

DEAVERE SMITH: Bones, chalk.

The white thing that is hard and becomes dust.

BETTS: I think chalk and choke are kind of specific in a sense that-- in a sense that it just paints the picture of, like, death and darkness.

We know what the chalk represents, and we know... What does the chalk represent?

The chalk outline of dead bodies.

When you think about what are you doing with chalk?

You're writing on the board, and then you can erase it.

So it's almost being extinguished.

Chalk I almost use as symbolic that I was being written off.

That the criminal justice system and the prosecutors were writing me off, and hoping that my life would be choked out.

"Mornings-after" I think about the morning I was found guilty.

The morning after I was arrested.

The morning after every single negative event.

Gosh, just listening to those words.

I can remember how, you know, one morning becomes 360 mornings before you know it.

Because it's not a one-day thing that you recover.

So it takes many mornings, many nights.

If I couldn't cultivate an inner strength to get past those mornings, I probably would not be here where I am today.

♪ ♪ LEE: Cultivation of strength in the dark.

Dark gardening.

Growing things, like growing things.

NEWTON: The poem's more so about cultivation, gardening, and it sounds like it's using the metaphor of planting.

We're going to find what we need when it is not given to us.

(crickets chirping) (engine running) McCAIN: "And on I went, though the dogs were spent, "and the grub was getting low.

"The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in."

I used to know it all by heart, but that was quite a few years ago.

The most important question really to ask you is how you learned this poem.

For a period of time, I guess it was a couple years I was next door to a cell to a fella whose name was Bill Lawrence.

And we had this tap code.

So he would tap to me a couple lines of this every day for quite a while.

And I would then tap it back to him, and that's how I learned it.

And so you were reciting poetry to each other.

And he was reciting this poem to me.

And I would type back what he'd typed to me, and then afterwards I would go over it and add it to what I had already known.

One thing you have in prison is (laughing): plenty of time.

(tapping sounds) To keep your mind active is really important in that environment.

LEE: Cultivation.

Yeah, work, practice.

Man, it's practice.

What are we cultivating?

Strength in the dark.

Dark gardening.

Unseen gardening, right?

Inner gardening.

The poem points to the inner world, the esoteric world, not the exoteric world.

That's calling for your strength, your inner strength, your faith to continue to push forward.

You're dealing with dirt, and it's supposed to be no good for anybody.

But when you start throwing in the fertilizer and the seeds and all the other things, you can actually build something from nothing.

♪ ♪ LEE: I call for you cultivation of victory.

Over long blows that you want to give and blows you are going to get.

I was never beaten very badly up until the time I refused early release.

But after that, it was very severe for... about eight or nine months as they attempted to get a war crimes confession out of me.

The thing that I keep stumbling over is where it says "the long blows you want to give."

She's basically saying victory over that impulse, right?

And so she's calling for a cultivation of strength, and a cultivation of victory...

Very nice.

...over these blows, which is a victory over violence, which is a victory, a kind of self-control, cultivate that.

I don't think our relationship with safety and violence is as cut and dry as we think.

I think this whole poem is like a recipe for the safe human being.

The Daoists said that a safe human being is somebody who stands in a marketplace, his cheeks smudged with dirt and smile on his face, and he blesses what needs to be blessed, and he kills what needs to be killed.

That's a safe human being.

She's suggesting the very same thing here.

REPORTER: What were some of the traits of your fellow prisoners that you admired most?

Courage, ingenuity.

Humor.

A sense of humor is very important.

If you don't have that, you have a tendency-- your captor to become larger and larger and more and more powerful, and therefore you're more and more intimidated.

If you laugh at him, then it puts him back to their... their actual size.

NEW: "To Prisoners," with its repetition of the call, and its multiple instances of parallelism, has an irregular but highly effective structure.

The longer lines seem to extend themselves to widen the poem's scope and expand its compassion, while shorter ones acknowledge pain and insult.

The line breaks seem to carry us over trials and obstacles, or drop us into the void.

The most important of Brooks's formal decisions is her arrangement of the three calls, each seeming to recognize a slightly different "you."

The poem has three parts, right?

It has these three movements, and the first is sort of acknowledging the darkness of prison, right?

And at first it's acknowledging what you have had to overcome.

DEAVERE SMITH: In other words, I will do this for you, on your behalf.

I call for your sake.

Yes.

LEE: A cultivation of strength in the dark.

DESKOVIC: I don't think it's like a literal call, it's not like a telephone call.

It's not even necessarily audible.

It's something, somebody is calling the prisoners like in their mind.

♪ ♪ BETTS: And then if you take the second movement: "I call for you cultivation of victory over long blows that you want to give and blows you are going to get."

So it's just this notion that I see you, I acknowledge that you've struggled, and I acknowledge that you already achieved the victory without me, right?

I believe poetry is a profound way to count.

Counting is everything.

It's altogether about-- - Like a census.

- Right.

A census, but also what counts.

Does this count?

DEAVERE SMITH: The last one, with the you I call for you does make it a little bit more like you, specifically you.

It is like one of those great tantric Buddhist paintings of the saint who's pointing out at you.

And it's saying, "This is about you."

DEAVERE SMITH: You know, actually, what it made me think about as well, is the notion of a call.

You know, that people feel they're called to do something.

NEWTON: The spiritual part comes out, and you can hear it, it's almost like a call and response.

You know, I'm calling out, and I'm seeing who's responding, who's receptive to what I'm trying to say.

(man humming) DEAVERE SMITH: Black sermonic rhetoric.

That type of call, which we do find in the black church, all of that calling, all of that calling is about the spirit.

To bring the spirit into the moment, and it doesn't have to be that the preacher's carrying it, it's not just one person in the church, but everybody is calling.

Everyone's calling on the lord.

Everyone's calling on the lord.

And on each other.

- And on each other.

NEW: Calling on each other was what sustained John McCain and his comrades through torture and isolation.

McCAIN: When I would go to interrogation, I would keep in mind that I was going to go back to my cell, and I was going to tap on the wall to Bill Lawrence, and others, what happened to me.

And I didn't want to let them down.

You know, we weren't tapping military secrets to each other or anything like that.

We were just keeping each other's spirits up.

♪ ♪ So I used to teach in middle school, and one of the challenges really was to try to figure how to make the students recognize that the poem talked to them, even if it wasn't about them.

Or how the poem might be about them, even if it seemingly wasn't about them.

The notion "Prisoners" does that because I could map onto this entire poem, which I've done, all of my experiences with incarceration.

But I'm absolutely certain that somebody else could read this and map on their experiences of dealing with depression.

(chuckles) And maybe this is just the gift of Gwendolyn Brooks.

We know that she was talking about prisoners, and yet through that specificity, we are able to speak to these much larger pieces of the human condition.

I don't know whether it's my mood today, I feel it's about life.

I think it's about families.

(laughing): I think it's about fathers, and mothers, and, um... and I think it's about relationships.

ADAMS: It's as if Gwendolyn Brooks dissected the feelings of both the people who are there, and the people who are affected by the people being there.

When a person goes to prison, their family takes a hit.

The wrinkles and creases of anguish that line my mother's forehead in the visiting room were a result of her not being there physically, but mentally being in prison with me that entire stretch.

NEW: Brooks wrote "To Prisoners" in the 1980s during the last years of South African Apartheid, and when the plight of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela began to attract world attention to the sufferings of the unjustly incarcerated.

ADAMS: And what it speaks to is the concept of prison itself and, you know, whether it be America, or other countries.

Yeah, there's no qualifications-- it's prisoners.

She doesn't say to the prisoners in Attica, the prisoners in Sing Sing.

LEE: Right.

NEW: The prisoners in South Africa, to the prisoners in Indonesia.

She doesn't say... LEE: Right.

Well, she doesn't qualify it.

To prisoners.

- To prisoners.

- To prisoners.

♪ ♪ NEW: So we have a poem that begins in gardening, and a call for cultivation of strength in the dark, and ends in the chalk and choke.

It doesn't really end in the chalk and choke.

I'm sorry, I disagree.

Tell me why.

Because I think it ends with "I call for you, cultivation of strength to heal and enhance."

That's where it ends.

The last movement says, "I call for you to heal and enhance."

And so it's this notion that you are valued.

You have a job to do.

BETTS: But also that you are needed, right.

That you have a role in this.

DEAVERE SMITH: You're actually going to make a contribution in the dark, in the morning after, in the chalk and in the choke.

Oh, you are in all those places still doing it.

DEAVERE SMITH: Yes.

So it's the wounded healer, it's the wounded healer.

After we've been tore down, after the soil's been turned over, now it's time to start growing, to pick yourself up.

You know, if every one of us has a metaphorical hammer, and we chip away at the wall, and every now and then a wall comes down, meaning a barrier is broken, we break through.

You have a chance in these prisons that whether it's a real prison or the prison of inequality, or the prison of a horrible family.

You have a chance, which is to-- Give.

To give, and to find that in yourself.

I think about the poem generally, that's saying "to prisoners," and the reader is thinking, "What are you saying to prisoners?"

And a prisoner who reads this says, "What are you saying?

What do you want me to do?"

What she's saying, prison is not your story, it doesn't end there.

There are, in fact, many, many mornings that come after, and you are needed in those mornings, right?

I mean the funny thing is prison is just a small part of it.

I was gone for eight-and-a-half years.

I'm every day in a process of figuring out what it means to, like, be a human being in this world.

You still have to find out how to love somebody.

You still have to find out like how to actively be a friend in the world.

You still have to find out how to raise a child.

I was privileged to observe a thousand acts of courage, and compassion, and love.

It's a great honor of my life.

♪ ♪ ADAMS: I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.

Dark garden in the vertigo cold.

In the hot paralysis.

Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.

Where it is dry.

Where it is dry.

I call for you, cultivation of victory over long blows that you want to give and blows you're going to get.

Over what wants to crumble you down to sicken you.

I call for you, cultivation of strength, to heal and enhance in the non-cheering dark.

In the many, many mornings-after.

In the chalk and choke.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪