notes for The Poetry Class, day 39

April 18, 1976  (I was 31)

                  notes for The Poetry Class, day 39

         The period was given over to a tangential topic.  I explained

why I hadn’t read the four notebooks I had taken home last night.

I said a friend asked me to accompany him to the Alameda County

Courthouse Lock-up to visit one of the prisoners who was due to be

sent to Death Row, San Quentin.  I described the courthouse building,

the disinfectant odor of its polished hallways and the apprehensive

atmosphere of the visiting process.  I talked about the elevator ride

to the twelfth floor, the officially courteous guards, steel walls, viewing

slits, cell-like cells, echoes, the tinny sound of the visitor phones. I

told them of the crime of the prisoner I visited –pushing a guy off the

San Mateo Bridge after a drug deal gone bad. I described some of

the other visitors there.  I mentioned the victims and the sense of

depression and tragedy.  When I asked Rick if he met any prisoners

whose cases he had read about, he pointed out Eldridge Cleaver three

feet away at the next phone.  Cleaver leaned over for a look through

our view slit.  On his white overalls he had inscribed HELP in marking

pen across his right breast.  Rick said many prisoners wrote prison

poetry and he was a captive audience.