Like anyone else, I knew Springsteen – but, unlike most, I’d never heard his music. Then, I got lost in it. Earworm. Hours and hours for months of Nebraska and the rest. In “House of Unending” I slip in a line from “Atlantic City” and “Johnny 99.” In both songs, the speaker refers to how empty pockets lead to crime and disaster: “I had debts no honest man could pay.” I spin the line back on itself, using it to speak to a man that left prison with debts that stem from memories of crime and violence and regret.
The first line of Patti Smith’s “Gloria” is “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” The song is a cover of the Them’s “Gloria.” But not a cover, because more than half of the words of Smith’s “Gloria” are her own, creating a conversation between the Them’s and her work. It’s all funky. And for me, Smith’s riffing on a rejection of the religion, becomes, like my take on Springsteen line, obsessing over regret and responsibility. Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine, mine I suffer for. This is what the speaker of House of Unending admits.
I read Rita Dove’s poem “Canary” while doing time at a dangerous and wild prison in Virginia where prisoners were confined in a cell for 23 hours each day. I was barely eighteen-years-old then. Had never heard Strange Fruit. Never heard of Billie Holliday. The poem’s final line, “If you can’t be free, be a mystery,” stayed with me for an entire prison sentence, becoming one of the things I carried. Two decades later, I stilled carried the line in my head. And it shows up here, in the second sonnet of “House of Unending,” a nod to surviving while staving off invisibility. And a reminder for me of how a single line in a poem can be a gesture to the reader’s survival. And, finally, as a kind of admission to myself: it’s a miracle to know part of who I became was because of a line in a poem.
And yet, despite it all, “we were the mask that grins in lies,” as I write in “Essay on Reentry,” alluding to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask.” I think Dunbar is the poet that made Dubois’s veil make sense for me - which is to say, Dubois, in my mind, has always alluded to Dunbar.
Those who know will hear these lines and think immediately of Dove’s “Canary,” of Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” of Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” of Smith’s “Gloria.” Those who don’t will read these notes and return to that work, and hopefully they’ll carry the line around in their head as I have.
ALSO BY REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS
Poetry
Bastards of the Reagan Era
Shahid Reads His Own Palm
Memoir
A Question of Freedom
Cover art by Titus Kaphar, excerpt from a body of work entitled The Jerome Project. kapharstudio.com
Copyright © 2019 by Reginald Dwayne Betts
All rights reserved
First Edition
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Jacket art by Titus Kaphar, excerpt from a body of work entitled The Jerome Project.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Betts, Reginald Dwayne, 1980– author.
Title: Felon : poems / Reginald Dwayne Betts.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019026008 | ISBN 9780393652147 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393652154 (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3602.E826 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026008
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