Poet, Inmate

The NY Times has a fascinating piece about a death-row murderer who writes poetry. He committed an atrocious crime 26 years ago, and has been waiting through appeal after appeal to be executed. Meanwhile, he has made himself a highly-regarded poet. "I'd have to say that anyone who has done 10 really glorious poems, and he's approaching that number, is a serious member of the inner sanctum," said Stuart Friebert, a former editor of Field.

Booker's poetry reprinted in the article didn't strike deep chords for me, but it is fascinating to see the intellectualist worldview break down. That worldview holds that evil is really ignorance, and that knowledge will enlighten one. Booker's case breaks this down; he has the anger and vitrolity of a street fighter, but the vocabulary and expressiveness of an English professor. His own tongue-in-cheek explanations belie an understanding on his part that his work cannot redeem or save him:

At times he can be unnervingly self-aware. "I may be paranoid," he said. "That would take somebody else to diagnose, but if I am, it has served me well in here"... "When I got here," he said, "I wasn't going to let my mind just ferment. I started thinking that maybe everything I'd read hadn't done me any good, and I almost convinced myself that what I'd read had got me into prison, that it was too informative about life, that it answered too many questions for a young guy. You know, translations of Baudelaire, William Burroughs. You're not supposed to be reading `Naked Lunch' at age 11, `Doors of Perception,' by Huxley. That had me in the kitchen cabinets trying to get off on nutmeg... When I got to death row, I couldn't blame it on society. I knew I'd put myself in prison. But if this was the end of my life, I wasn't going to sit in a cell and watch TV or crane my neck trying to look out the window at the other wing of the prison."