In neither his early imaginary nor his later representative drawings of Roman prison cells does the eighteenth-century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi attempt to capture their actual dimensions. Rather, the dark gigantism of his sketches captures something perhaps more important than historical factuality: the dwarfism of human bodies vis-à-vis enclosures whose spatial dimensions seem only the square root of a duration raised to the nth power. Piranesi, disturbed by the preserved prisons he saw, attempted to represent what could not be represented. He thus stands apposite to his younger contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, whose drawings of a speculative panopticon were all too prescient of our age, which has raised the visual to a power theoretically infinite. Or as Randall Horton puts it in “Unreliable Narrator,” “this is the fantastical dreamed up / / in the mind of someone real.”
The algebraic relation between a prison cell and a prison sentence is all too appropriate in Horton’s most recent book of poems, {#289-128}, whose title acknowledges the relationship between enumeration and visual shorthand. The pictographic signifiers (# and -) frame and link cell and number; the so-called school-to-prison pipeline is here a miscalculation. Prison-to-prison (#-#) is more like it, even if the “prisons” framing the life of a human body stand in for other enclosures: the black ghetto, for one, the prison-house of language, for another. Or we might simply note the titles of the three sections of the book: “Property of the State” (begin in prison), “Poet in Residence” (“aesthetic privilege in “a nation trying / to erase a nation in the subconscious”), and “Poet in New York” (color commentary, so to speak, on Lorca’s reportage). Objectively, of course, the three sections mark the narrator’s journey from imprisonment to freedom, but freedom is, for Horton, a matter of stepping out of the frying pan into the fire.
The themes of all three sections of this book can be found in the representative poem “Roxbury Correctional Book Club,” which marries miniaturization of the self (“…dear / hayden: the [I] in me no longer lives / / it vanished i confess…”) to liberation of the imagination (“…yes, walls here are gray/ not green but know your poems sing— / again, [I] does not exist, comrade. i do”). Comprising four parts titled after literary genres (poetry, memoir, fiction, and drama), “Roxbury” is essentially a tour of the body and spirit of a tormented man who “will never know if change is real,” a man who recognizes the “the slow fatality of imprisonment” but also holds out hope that “a book might save [his] life after lock in.” Placed near the end of the first section, “Property of the State,” “Roxbury” can easily be misread as yet another predictable redemption story. The narrators of these poems (yes, the selves here are also plural even if they emanate from one body) err from prison to prison, knights-errant who understand that the monetization of all life and nonlife means that “choice” is a matter of picking how one wants money, for example, to orient one’s life.
In that sense those who are not cast aside, who, as we say, make a living, which is to say, make money, are also making currency, that is, doing time: “here said at night eight years stops / short of a dime with a nickel done / routines create another kind of normal.” Doing time is not the same as making time, say those of us in the other, perhaps larger, cells (more room for moving about is our “freedom”). And doing a dime is not the same as making a dime. But as Horton’s “another kind of normal” reminds us, the “normal” is not a state of being but a measure of habituation. Doing and making are both forms of labor. And freedom? “freedom ain’t nothing not / even a word. so don’t give me that regurgitated sound reprogrammed.” Instead, “an unconditional condition is what we asked for / someone yelled.” In marking the difference between “freedom” and “an unconditional condition,” this other voice, this other “someone,” implicitly exposes the very principle underlying Western democracies (the sanctity of the individual) as nothing more than a self-serving shibboleth. Accepting the limits of human “nature” nurtured by culture, the “we” of this poem, quite different from the “we” of “Roxbury” (in that poem, “the collective (we) / is no better…”), demand instead the removal of the asterisk—or, if you prefer, scarlet letter—affixed to every Black (my generation) and African American (Horton’s generation) body. The impossibility of the dream (an unfettered citizenship) does not mitigate the effort; as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both knew, the very survival of African Americans depends on affirming the impossible while expanding the limits of the possible. In that sense, both were optimists. The years since, however, have given more weight to impossibility; attenuated possibility has been dramatized as the ultimate enclosure by poets like Dawn Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes, Duriel E. Harris and, now, Randall Horton: “because a box is a box humans are cultivated / into said box without choice or explanation.” Of course, for Horton the box is both symbol and literal object, but its manifestation as a prison cell is no more “real” than those other cells I named near the end of this essay’s first paragraph.
Because it may not go without saying, none of this is, for Horton, an abdication of that other misused, often abused, cliché: personal responsibility. Under capital and its concomitant mode of carceral punishment, responsibility and irresponsibility can only conform to clichés—“baby create baby & raise baby”—but unlike so many satisfied to leave it at that, Horton immediately contextualizes this apparent axiom with another cliché: “somewhere in the caribbean a plane loads / brick by brick, a death house.” In other words, the reproduction of children by children is not only analogous to the reproduction of the drug market (“addicts begetting addicts”); the former guarantees a future market for the latter, to say nothing of the prison market. In this context, personal responsibility demands that babies disrupt their own traffic into the drug and prison markets, motivated by limited incentives that are only ever moral and never economic. These quotations from Horton’s poem “When The Government Doesn’t Love You (The Eighties)” meld two clichés—Black babies having Black babies, black consumption and distribution of illegal drugs—into a stereotype of Black irresponsibility. Personal responsibility, in the best circumstances, means embracing black individuality, an adjunct to black capitalism, and jettisoning the possibility of the Black nation as a collective (“disappear the self (collectively)”), one that would not be isomorphic with the masses. As Horton’s poem suggests, the conflation of the Black nation (a concept of sixties and seventies cultural nationalism) and masses (a term from the nineteenth century) underscores the ways that new constructs of Black “pathology” are melded to older ones (for example, eugenics) to reinforce a singular, stereotypical narrative. Reforming this narrative, which is to say, altering the words (the “ghetto” is now “urban”), is, like all reforms, an affirmation of the syntax: prison-to-prison (or if one prefers, school-to-prison). Prison abolition, like defunding the police, can only be engaged as part of a larger struggle against capital. Otherwise, it remains a slogan, which is to say, no matter how “radical” sounding, a victory for reform.
None of these issues come up explicitly in {#289-128}; rather, every poem points toward that future (impossible as much as possible) and away from the present where “skin color / is a race that never stops running.” In this collection of poems, Horton neither lags behind nor pretends to be ahead of the game. He stays abreast, zigzags, ducks, and scampers alongside, filing reports from a margin, a liminal strip irreducible to an outside (curious tourist) or an inside (embedded correspondent). He is elsewhere and not materialized in the experience of riding the subway, site and nonsite of possibility, precisely the (non-)position of the foreign “element” that Lorca, among others, knew so well. In the multi-sectional “Subway Chronicles” we read that “the last stop is also a beginning point” and “there is departure in arrival.” However, the cautious optimism of these lines is belied by the narrator’s inescapable memory: the “ghost compartment” in which he finds himself after the last passengers depart the subway car appears in his mind’s eye as the hole, solitary, a claustrophobic space and detemporalized duration that insulated him from seeing or hearing another prisoner’s suicide. It was there, and by extension, here, on the subway, that one’s existence is revealed as “an impossible construct” that “walks upright.” In short, for the narrator, what stands in a subway car, what hunkers down in solitary, is an object, the property of the state for a certain time. For that time, short or long, Homo sapiens devolves into Homo erectus, and thus becomes a curio subject to institutional scrutiny and the catalog: “let’s call [#289-128] human.” This asterisked human is a cliché, the “repeated action” of stereotype. Yet, for all its refusals to simply get over it, to get on with life, {#289-128} is not, in the end, a document of despair. Navigating the strait between individual will and systemic constraints attests to, without testifying for, a future not yet written in stone.