Transcript
A (0:09)
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We finish out our producer Pick show with lawyer, advocate and poet Reginald Dwayne Betts. I first heard of Betts in 2016. I was working for PBS NewsHour, and crime reform was one of my beats. I met Betts when I was doing a story about an organization to help artists who were incarcerated. He was one of the inaugural fellows in 1996. He was part of a carjacking at 16 years old, and he served eight years behind bars. Betts has spent his adulthood on prison reform. He graduated from Yale Law School. He teaches and he wrote several books. His latest is a book of poetry called Doggerel. It came out 20 years to the day he was released from prison, March 4, 2025, the day he was on our show. Betts believes poetry matters. He believes books matter. So much so that he founded Freedom Reads, a library service to get books into the hands of incarcerated people. Freedom Reads started five years ago, and there are 419 Freedom Libraries in 12 states. Let's listen to Reginald Dwayne Betts. This is him reading his poem White Peonies, White Pennies.
B (1:27)
This is how it happens. One morning the ground is only the ground, and then green shoots through the rich brown loam. I learned the word loam when I was starving for something. Fools would call it love and I would say it was a time machine, longing for some days, months, years, when the sorrows didn't bloom like this thing from the ground that I can barely name. Tell me how these peonies have migrated from Asia to my garden and found their way into my line of vision despite prison and all the suffering. I don't speak. It all happens so sudden, is what I mean to say. When sadness becomes a beauty before your eyes, so startling, you ask friends what to name the flower before you. I admit I pretended to be God to give a name to this thing that gives me joy. I called it Sunday and then called it my firstborn. Have you ever been so rattled by the unexpected that you wanted someone's blessing to name the thing? The peonies are so lovely they frighten me. They grow on thin stems longer than my arms, with blooms heavier than the stalks. But isn't it always so? The beauty of the world so hefty? We fear the world cannot stand it, and yet why would we not want to pray when we notice? Why do we forget that naming is the first kind of prayer? Even as the white flowers turned into scented oil against my skin?
A (3:05)
That's Reginald Dwayne Betts, reading from the book Doggerel Poems. This is your third book of poetry. And in the back you explain the way the book came about. And you write very clearly that poetry matters. Why do you believe that poetry matters?
B (3:24)
It's wild. It's my fourth book of poetry. I'm going to say five, though.