Reginald Dwayne Betts: “forgetting who / Loves you is the easiest way to vanish”
This poet, performer, and attorney is the Founder and CEO of Freedom Reads, bringing libraries into prisons
“A poem is a place where you create reality. A poem ends up being a vehicle for me to contemplate loss or fatherhood or absence or whatever. The act of writing a poem becomes revelatory because it forces me to uncover what I think.”
—Reginald Dwayne Betts, in an interview
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, performer, attorney, and Founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. He decided when he was 16, in prison, that he was going to be a writer. He had thought he would be an engineer, but that all changed when he ended up being part of a carjacking — a haphazard act with a fellow young man whose name he didn’t even know. No one was hurt, but he was tried as an adult and sentenced to 9 years in prison.
The prison had an underground library, a secret exchange of books among the men who were locked up. One day, when Reginald was in solitary confinement, someone slipped a book under his prison cell door: The Black Poets, an anthology by Dudley Randall.
“I’m in the hole. Summertime in Virginia is hot. I’m meeting and discovering Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Robert Hayden, Amiri Baraka,” Reginald remembered in an interview years later with CBS Sunday Morning.
As he read poems by Etheridge Knight, he thought to himself: “Oh, man, I could try this.” (WSJ interview)
Reginald, now 44, has published multiple books of poetry, including Shahid Reads His Own Palm and Felon: Poems, as well as a memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison.
His latest book of poems, Doggerel, came out last month.
The book’s poems are about dogs — and much more.
“It’s me thinking about what it means to learn something about the world from Taylor, a Jack Russell terrier who joined my family during the pandemic, and how that first dog helped me see so many things anew,” explained Reginald, in a NYT interview. “But also, the title, it means garbage poetry, and I wanted it to be tongue in cheek — to say that these are poems that speak to everyone, that pun and riff and make fun of themselves a bit as they reveal something about the world.”
Listen to Reginald read “Of All This,” a poem from his new book.
Reginald is a magnificent storyteller. His poems draw you into a scene, a moment, a sober observation, the keen sight of human troubles and joys, a spell of gratitude.
His poem “Roadkill,” from Doggerel, starts in the dark hours, when “stars acknowledge no one at this time.”
It goes on:
& the dead black thing in the street is an animal Until I get close enough to see that it's only A bag flitting in the wind. We've all been mistaken For something less than alive in this life I know.
And the last line is haunting …
Under Basquiat's crown, forgetting who Loves you is the easiest way to vanish.
After he left prison, Reginald went to Prince George’s Community College and later law school at Yale. And he founded Freedom Reads, “the only organization in the nation transforming the experience of incarceration by opening libraries in cellblocks.”
“Somebody said to me, what would you do if money wasn’t an issue, and you wanted to do something for people who are in prison?” said Reginald. “I said, we put millions of people in prison. I would put millions of books into prison.”
More, please
By the Book: Interview with Reginald Dwayne Betts (NYT gift link)
Read his poem “At the End of Life, a Secret” (The Poetry Foundation)
Reginald Dwayne Betts’ website
NPR’s Morning Edition: Reginald Dwayne Betts discusses his new collection of poems, 'Doggerel'
On Instgram @dwaynebetts
A New Literary Prize Taps a Jury Living Behind Bars (NYT gift link), about the new Inside Literary Prize, from Freedom Reads, of which Reginald is the Executive Director and Founder
See you tomorrow with another poet!
Brianne
That line… “We've all been mistaken
For something less than alive in this life I know.”