Reginald Dwayne Betts on Freedom and Poetic Constraint

Episode Transcript

Reginald Dwayne Betts You know, I probably should read you a poem, because I got a new book that just came out on March 4th, which was the 20th anniversary of my release from prison.

Virginia Marshall Wow.

Reginald Dwayne Betts And I am delighted.

Adwoa Adusei This is Reginald Dwayne Betts. He’s a poet and a lawyer and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads, an organization with the goal of bringing a library to every cell block in America.

Virginia Marshall We talked to him a couple of months ago, and you may have heard clips from our interview with him in last week’s episode about The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But there was so much that we talked about that we couldn’t fit, including a reading of a poem from Betts’s latest book of poems, Doggerel. Here it is.

Reginald Dwayne Betts I am going to read “Bike Ride.”

Returning from a gravel path,
I ride a bike with my oldest boy,
& this is where he learns how the body
Fails you. Each time I pause, he asks
If I’m okay, & I say yes & climb
Back on the bike as if I believe
I won’t falter again. I know I will.
The ride no more than 2 miles
Along and Italian road but so much
More than my body can take these days.
We’d been searching for a haunted house
& I should admit that my son don’t
Like birds, but when I’d found this
Abandoned church & hundreds of
Wings turned it into a scene from Hitchcock,I wanted to share that mixture of joy
& fear I’d felt. I imagine he knew —
Mostly I wanted to be close to him
In a way that my father has never been
To me. Biking to that old church, we
Were interlopers, & discovered barking
That wanted us to take leave, particularly
The Gandolf looking like little mutt
In our path. Micah would have tangled
With the beast to save me, I know,
& as we ride, & I stop, & he asks
If I’m okay, I don’t know what it means
For a child to see his father weep, but knowWhat it means to be saved by a son.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Thank you so much. I wish I had a whole audience… that’s great.

[Laughter]

Adwoa Adusei That was Reginald Dwanye Betts, reading his poem “Bike Ride,” from his new collection, Doggerel. We’ll include a link to that book and Betts’s others in our show notes.

Virginia Marshall And now, back to our conversation with Betts, which we’re sharing as a bonus episode this week. I’m Virginia Marshall.

Adwoa Adusei And I’m Adwoa Adusei. You’re listening to Borrowed and Returned: a podcast from Brooklyn Public Library about the books that have changed us, and changed America, too.

[Music]

Reginald Dwayne Betts When I was in prison and it was one of these meetings and we were talking and it was some word that they mentioned, and I knew the meaning of it. I'd never forget how they looked at me. I thought, man. I've never felt so much pride in being intelligent in my life. Let me hold onto that. Let me nurture that. And I spent my whole time in prison nurturing that instead of nurturing the violence that sometimes felt like it would overwhelm me.

Virginia Marshall Mhm. And you were writing too, right? You started your poetry book there?

Reginald Dwayne Betts I mean, I started writing there, yeah. I wouldn't say I started my poetry book there, but I started writing there.

Virginia Marshall Got it, yeah.

Reginald Dwayne Betts I mean, maybe I just started every poetry book there because when you become a poet, you always writing. And I think I became a poet in prison, in solitary confinement. And it changed the way I saw the world. So I like to think that every one of my books started in prison. But you know, more than that, I like to think that my poetic thinking started in prison.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, yeah, wow. And that just makes me think of so many things about, like, constraints within poetry, too, and how it allows you to, like, think out of the box.

Reginald Dwayne Betts I tell people that a lot because it's like, you know, I write ghazals. I write sestinas. I write sonnets. I write canzones. I’ve written all kinds of — I write pantunes, villanelles. And I do consider myself somewhat of a formal poet, partly because I think the constraint really does allow you to make meaning.

Virginia Marshall Got it, thank you, I appreciate that. And I guess I should back up a little bit and ask you about the founding of Freedom Reads and where that came from for you.

Reginald Dwayne Betts Every story has at least a thousand answers, I guess. And one answer, of course, is that I wanted to do something meaningful in the world. And books have always been a foundation in my life. And so it was easy, when given an opportunity, when asked what would I do if money wasn't an issue—to name flooding the prison with books. And it's true. I do believe that books … I think about prison as a glass, and the people as water in that glass and books as ice cubes. And you can imagine a glass on your kitchen counter, and somebody dropping ice cube after ice cube after ice cube, first one at a time, then two, then three, then whole buckets. And at some point, the water overflows. I think about books being the catalyst to prison doors opening. I do think freedom begins with a book. And I think maybe that's the honest way of telling how it began.

But the other real way is that if you go to prison, people don't love you, they don't respect you, they don't want to hire you. People who, you know, who you care about will ask you things like, what man did you have sex with in prison? And they won't ask you that in 2025, they'll ask you in 2005, when we were supposed to be far less homophobic. And you know and the fascinating thing about it is the people who ask you those questions—were you raped in prison, were you abused?—those are people who claim to love you. It's people who walk into the courtroom with me, who ask me questions like that. And so part of the decision to found Freedom Reads was predicated on the fact that the world does not love you when you hurt people. There is very little forgiveness—or maybe that's not fair. There are mounds of forgiveness that we get in this world. But sometimes, you know, when you've done something that lands you in prison, while you're in prison and when you come home, you are reminded again and again that you no longer have access to what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community.

Virginia Marshall One of the things I'm also interested in, I guess, is in The Autobiography of Malcolm X … he talks a lot about reading in prison, right, like educating yourself while you’re there. Which really reminds me of your story.

Reginald Dwayne Betts It's interesting. I think we all have a relationship to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I remember the Spike Lee movie, and in some ways Malcolm X's life permeates the existence of people who serve time in prison, and it does it in radical ways. It's hard not to have a relationship with the book. And me personally, having saw the film, having read the book, but also having served time in prison and having founded an organization called Freedom Reads, which builds libraries in prisons—of course, I'm thinking about El Hajj Malik Shabazz. And in fact, even when I say that, I think about Robert Hayden, who is a poet who wrote a poem called “El Hajj Malik Shabazz.” And most of us know Malcolm X, know El Hajji Malick Shabaz as Malcolm X, but it's interesting because for me, he enters into my psyche as a civil rights leader, as a Sunni Muslim, as somebody who went to prison, became a member of the Nation of Islam.

I like to actually think about this essay that a wonderful writer, Greg Tate, wrote called “Growing Up In Public,” and it was about Amiri Baraka. And he talked about how looking at Baraka's life, you could see how he had these phases and he changed. And what was radical about the essay is it acknowledged that change is important and it is good, but it is not one of those things that we necessarily value in those who we would call leaders, who we would call civil rights activists, who we will call heroes. But I do think that Malcolm X is somebody who you can see changing his mind quite often. And it's not just from having a criminal mind to being more conscious. It is going through different phases and deeply understanding that it is a kind of brotherhood that actually extends beyond race. And I personally think that's a powerful sentiment given how exhausted I am with the same narratives that keep my friends in prison, the narrative about Black and white.

The truth is I started reading actively and sort of consistently when I first picked up an encyclopedia when I was in second grade and discovered George Mikan and “Earl the Pearl” Monroe and Gale Sayers. And, you know, this notion, really, that a book could teach you something that happened decades ago. And from learning about that thing, from learning about “Pistol Pete” Maravich, you can learn, or Mikan, you can learn a jump hook, or “Earl the Pearl” Monroe, you could learn the up and under layup. And it's just descriptive that open those things up to me. And when I got into prison and I was looking for solace, I realized that I had been in solace in books for a very, very long time. And that just made sense for me to lean on books. But honestly, it made sense to me to tell myself that I would become a writer because I had no sense of what else I might become, given the fact that I was in prison as a teenager. And a writer I did become, and I'm really grateful for that.

Virginia Marshall So I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about what reading was like in prison and how were books passed around? What was the library like when you were there?

Reginald Dwayne Betts You know, I mean, people bought books. People traded books. People went to the library, if there was a library. You found books in places. I mean, it was the same way that we found books here. The thing was, it was more desperate because you can only get paperback books. And oftentimes libraries might not exist, so they might not be well-stocked. You go to the library, you can spend 30 minutes there. So, for me, you can't just browse fiction. Even if you browse—see I know 811. 811 is poetry because every time I went to the library, I went to the same section. They still had a Dewey Decimal system. So I'm going into 811 and I'm reading poetry. And now, if you was interested in philosophy, that might be in the 200s, fiction might be in the 700s—but the point is you got 30 minutes. And there might only be 40 books in your section. But if you are committed to the art that's in that section, every time you get 30 minutes, that's the only section you could go to.

And so one of the things I imagine my work is doing is trying to give people a broader scope of the books that they can encounter, a broader scope of the book that they might come to love. ‘Cause I never read Homer in prison. You know, I never read enough Shakespeare in prison. I don't even know if I've read Shakespeare in prison at all. And so it's huge gaps in my reading that wouldn't have been gaps if I would have had maybe access to some of the things that Freedom Reads provides to folks on the inside.

Virginia Marshall Yeah. And so tell me a little bit more about the collections that are made available through your libraries. Is it everything? Does it specialize?

Reginald Dwayne Betts Oh, it's a browsing collection, and it's everything because the beautiful thing about it is if you give somebody 500 books, they could write a history of the world. Just asked Sir Walter Raleigh. And so we give you, you know, you got your run of first book, like detective novels and things like that. And you got your Homers, your Iliads, you've got your Faulkners, your Morrisons, but then you got your run of poetry, you got your sci-fi. I mean, 500 books is actually a lot of books and there's a whole world to get lost in. So I've had people write me back, say, ‘Yeah, I'm reading De Profundis.’ And honestly, the real thing though, and this is, this is a real thing about books—because I am now what people might call highly educated, right? And I've had the time to get the kind of training to like, teach me how to write better, teach me how to think more clearly, teach me how to articulate my words on a page better. But the truth is that it was my access to books for so long and my ability to read them for so long that created the foundation for me to do those things. And that's what we try to provide folks on the inside, the foundation for them to begin to walk that walk of really honing their ability to say, ‘I am somebody in this world.’

Virginia Marshall Yeah, that’s great. And so what is the reach of Freedom Libraries now? Like how many states, how many books?

Reginald Dwayne Betts It's interesting, like how do you define reach? You know what I mean? Like, when you read a good book, what is the reach of that book in your life? You know, how many people do you tell about that amazing book that you read? And the reason why I say that is because once we walked into a prison, and this guy, we opened up a Freedom Library on the cell block, and we put the Freedom Libraries on the cell blocks so that when you get out of the bed, walk out of your cell, you can see something beautiful. Nature is now close to you. I did eight and a half years in prison and never touched a piece of a tree. The only living thing I was allowed to put my hands on without catching the case was my own body. Imagine that, y'all. Sentence you to life in prison. And say if you put your hand on another living thing, you go into a hole.

And so we bring Freedom Libraries into prison, recognizing that that wood that has been shaped and transformed into bookcases that become libraries when we fill them with 500 books. When people walk in, they see this curving set of bookcases that only stand 44 inches high because they allow six or seven or eight people to circle around it and commune over literature. When they look at that wood, somebody said, ‘Yo, I can see the ocean in that wood.’ And they say that from a prison that is more than 500 miles away from any ocean. I mean, we do it, and I actually believe it's magical.

And when you ask me what our reach is, I mean the first point is our reach is places that books have never reached before in this way. And the second point is when you touch somebody like that, when we walked into that cell block and his kids saw SA Cosby's book, Blacktop Wasteland, he said, ‘My mama worked with him. She read drafts of this book.’ And I remember the email his mom sent. She said, ‘My son called me, told me y'all brought a library in there. They got a SA Cosby’s book. I ain't heard my son with this much joy in life in his voice.’

We talk about this, and we talk about this in a state like this, in a country like this now, where the ability for us to do our work is absolutely predicated first and foremost on the support of people who might be listening now. Five dollars, ten dollars, fifteen dollars, twenty dollars. But you know the thing is, even those people who give that support, I want them to understand that what that support is is that mother being able to hear her son's voice not weeping, not struggling, not wondering. She gets to hear his voice and say, ‘Yo I had a conversation with my kid that warmed my heart, even though he was still in prison. It was an absolute surprise that this thing happened, and I know that my son matters because somebody came in there and said that he matters.’

Virginia Marshall You've published a number of books now. Have you been able to see people connecting with your books on a Freedom Library shelf? And what's that like for you?

Reginald Dwayne Betts Nah, you know, one time I was in this joint, right? And I had brought in Redaction, and somebody was holding it and was looking at it. And I had to leave. And I had to grab the book and the guy was like, ‘Oh no, I wasn't going to take it from you.’ I was like, ‘Oh you know what man, you can have that joint.’ And I just signed it and left. And he was like, ‘Yo, you giving this to me?’ And man, he acted like I was giving him a treasure. And when you see how people value this thing that they lack, that they haven't had, what’s most humbling about it, is that if I'm perfectly honest, I started Freedom Reads because I was trying not to die. I started Freedom Reads because I have two children that I wanted to take care of and I couldn't get a job because I got a state number attached to my name. And now I got a bar number, too. I'm a lawyer. I got an attorney license number attached to my name as well. But the one that carries the most weight in the marketplace is not my Yale Law degree. It is my criminal record. And I started Freedom Reads because there was no way that I could be who I am now in any, you know, Fortune 10,000 company in the world.

We have built more than 400 freedom libraries across 13 states and 40 prisons. But there are 20,000 prisons that we intend to reach in the United States. And somebody says, well, that's a huge problem. Slavery was a huge problem. World War I was a problem, World War II was a huge problem. Polio was a huge problem. The AIDS crisis was a huge problem. The fact that men and women and children are starving and dying in prison for lack of what can be found in a book cannot be the huge problem that we say it is. Because the Gutenberg Library is literally the most revolutionary piece of technology ever invented. And the only thing that's stopping me from having a Freedom Library in every prison in America, and transforming all of those lives, is a rounding error in, like, any kind of local budget.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Thank you for speaking with us, and for talking a little bit about your work and Malcolm X.

Reginald Dwayne Betts No, really, I enjoyed this, y’all. I appreciate y'all doing this. You know, I'm an official Brooklynite. Well, BAM called me an official Brooklynite. I gave the MLK speech a couple of years ago, and it was lovely actually. I was deeply honored. You know, I said the way the world looks at me as a convict, and how I might have overstated the case. Because I want to remember that Brooklyn, that BAM, said that we want to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and we believe that you should come speak. And I got shown a lot of love there. And I think that that is the love that allows Freedom Reads to actually matter and to exist. And being welcomed to Brooklyn, you know, on MLK Day to talk about my life was something that was deeply and profoundly unexpected. And to be able to talk to you today was the same, so thank you.

Virginia Marshall Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, and you were right down the street from Spike Lee's studio, so there was a lot …

Reginald Dwayne Betts Spike didn’t come through though! I've been trying to get Spike to come to the Freedom Library for like at least two years now. So Spike Lee, if you listening to this—Spike, yo, we Brooklyn. Me and you need to get together. Talk about Freedom Reads. Talk about Freedom Libraries. Let's do it.

Virginia Marshall Yes, amazing! Hopefully he’s listening. [Laughs]

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei That’s it for this bonus episode. We’ll include links to books by Reginald Dwayne Betts in our show notes so you can read more.

Virginia Marshall And we’ll be back next week with our next full episode about A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It’s written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall, and co-hosted with Adwoa Adusei. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.  

Adwoa Adusei Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate. Our Borrowed advisory team is made up of Fritzi Bodenheimer, Nick Higgins, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Olivo. Our marketing and design team for this series includes Laurie Elvove, Ashley Gill, Jennifer Proffitt, Lauren Rochford and Leila Taylor.

Virginia Marshall That’s it for this episode. Until next time … keep re-reading.