Death Row Poetics
Dateline: 12/21/96I’m a poetry addict. Poetry books are my fix.
Poetry books also happen to be the hardest household item to move. I know this well, because I’ve just moved (again!), a traumatic experience when I spent days agonizing over the existential decision-making that poetry bookpacking requires: slender spines and varied sizes of these jewels mean you have to constantly debate FILLING THE BOX, which protects the books and makes for fewer boxes, vs. MAINTAINING THE ALPHABETICAL ORDER, which saves time and thought and which I maniacally strive for.
Unpacking poetry is love’s labor. Each book is the voice that intuits a life. And since most of the poets on my shelves are alive (unlike most poetry libraries), I feel like I am touching these lives. I touch each book, visit those lives. And I linger over the poets who died in the past year.
I remember the astonishing Larry Eigner, typing with one finger, a letter at a time, and Patricia Landrum and her obligato gospel performance with a gasping heart, and Joseph Brodsky, his chilling lines in The United States of Poetry:
What’s the use of forgetting
If it’s followed by dying?
But it’s when I reach Harold "Wili" Otey that I stop cold. Wili is in a category all by himself. Two years ago, in our last conversation, he was so full of life, you’d never guess that each day added to his record for Longest Stay on Death Row, that he once had his appeal granted while being strapped into the electric chair.
See, Wili was a convicted rapist and murderer, a part of his life we never talked about -- I’d read the papers, seen the TV shows. WE got together because Wili was poet, too, and that we did talk about. Until he was executed, a year ago, murdered by the state, electrocuted. He had been on Death Row for seventeen years following his conviction of rape and murder in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Three small chapbooks and a file of loose papers -- about average for a poet on my shelves. And in many ways Otey is like most of the other poets around him -- an unknown poet who lived for poetry.
The chill feeling of absence, of human potential lost and wasted is different from any other feeling. The absence caused by society’s decision to send four 2,400-volt jolts of electricity coursing through Wili Otey is a sickening barbarism. In executing killers, society joins them: we are murderers.
Poets, speak out against the death penalty. This is an issue whose time has come, an idea that can that can move hotly through the Web. The silence where Wili Otey once was, from where he stood and spoke, sat and wrote, is an emptiness that indicts us all.
CLEM
by Harold "Wili" Otey (1965-1995)
we can be anything we want
they tell us when four
five six up to twelve years of age
but then. . .
I dream of being
a gazelle
legs legs and muscles
sinewy and striding
tight composed
running across iowa fields at midnight
dressed only in the glisten of the
moon with air ice-cubed driving
pounds of energy into
feet ankles knees locomoting
my gut dancing with my chest
the brain free of the baseness of
earth one feels so far away
bout to soar fly buss the bosom of
heaven it was only then i saw
others looking at me
strangely I stopped imagining
how about you?
RESOURCES:
and me I am like the leaf (1981)
singing for mooncrumbs (1985)
yeah clementine (1991)
all from Bench Press
332 North 4th
Seward, NE 68434
A MUST-READ:
Legal Lynching:
Racism, Injustice and the Death Penalty
by Jesse Jackson with Jesse Jackson, Jr.
(Marlowe, 1996)
